Receiving messages sent from myself

[chris ashdown]

Over the last three days I have been sent about 100 emails telling me of problems with my account with different subject headings, all with attachments and all showing my own email address as originator.

Obviously if I opened them rather than preview them I would unload some nasty

Is anyone else suffering this sort of attack. at least 20 emails this morning

[MDS]

I had 60 of the buggers the other week

All telling me my email account had been suspended blah blah, and from myself.

Check if they are from email accounts you actually use, if not-which hopefully they arn't set your catchall account to fail. This will reject all the spam mails as undeliverable.

Since enabling spam assasin & setting my catchall to fail my spam is now maybe 1 day.

Mick

[kathynewman]

same here - over the last couple of days had loads of emails from almost anything@puddlepetcare.co.uk telling me of all sorts of problems.

Using mailwasher am just deleting them.

Be interesting to know why it's suddenly started to happen though?

Kathy

[chris ashdown]

How are you making sure you are not deleting real emails, I'm thinking some of these are from Sales@, Info@, Peter@, etc. which may be real emails on my sites

[MDS]

How are you making sure you are not deleting real emails, I'm thinking some of these are from Sales@, Info@, Peter@, etc. which may be real emails on my sites

By setting the catchall to fail, no emails to a genuine address are lost, so your safe there.

In this particular incident all were from accounts not actually in use so it just stopped.

[pinbrook]

We advice all our clients not to use the catch all, and not use prefixes such as sales, webmaster, postmaster, info, mail etc. As these are addresses that spammers target.

Set up your email account with specific addresses only, and use specific prefixes for certain tasks. ie if you have a webform use one address for it, use a different address to communicate with customers, use a different one for this forum etc etc. Then use message filters to sort the mail when it arrives in your email client. Also create a message filter that deletes all messages containing certain words such as viagra, hot chicks etc

By doing this if one address gets spammed (and the one you use to communicate with customers will) you have an easier method of identifying bad email, and you can then takes steps to close this account. For example every 6 months or so I change the prefix I use on my contact us form.

If your host supplies Spam Assassin use it to black list the worst offenders, use the white list to let people through. For example I have *@yahoo.com and *@yahoo.co.uk on my black list. I then let addresses of known yahoo users through on the white list. ie friend1@yahoo.co.uk.

I also have an autorespond on closed addresses which simply says the address is unmonitored and please use the webform to contact us.

Some of these methods are draconian, and I suspect I lose a few emails, but on the other hand, I receive about 4 spams a day.

[fleetwood]

The only problem with deleting the catchall (and I agree that at times it seems the only way to filter out the spam), is that you can be caught out by genuine typos.
For example, if your main address is peter@mywebsite.co.uk, and a customer mistypes as petyr@mywebsite.co.uk, that email will get unintentionally ditched.


Martin.

[MDS]

The only problem with deleting the catchall (and I agree that at times it seems the only way to filter out the spam), is that you can be caught out by genuine typos.

I agree, which is why we intially went with a catchall.

But to be honest I would have to say I would prefer to lose the odd typo than have my mailboxes filled with spam/viruses etc.

For us it had become a major problem, and the amount of time that was needed to weed out the genuine emails from the bombardment of spam & viruses was ridiculous.

Never again will I ever use a catchall

[pinbrook]

As I mentioned before if you put an autoresponder on your catch all, people who are genuinely sending you an email will get a reply saying there message has been rejected so they can try again.

Using spam filters is always going to present the risk of losing the odd email, but i suspect you miss the odd email when you receive 500 spams and 6 genuine emails.

How the filter is a personal choice

receive hundreds of spam to ensure you get every email which is intended for you

or

filter and lose the odd false positive