and no, I am not talking about them sending me stuff. This past week I have been getting 50 to 100 pieces of RETURNED email due to unknown addresses, blocked by spam folders, etc etc. I know they are not actually using my email address as I changed the password right after it happened, but I am still getting them. There are probably thousands of people in Russia who think I am a huge spammer. (most of the returns are from .ru email addresses)
Any clue how to stop this?
No idea, but I'd love to know as well. Always feel awkward when I get bounce messages or out of office notification from people I didn't email and have never heard of...
There's nothing you can do about it. Their bots just use any email address they have to forge the return from. I had hess@flash.net as my email for about 10 years, maybe more. It was sucked out of eBay in the 90's by a crawler someone wrote that pulled every email off eBay when that was your user ID. Plus, all the virii that went around pulling emails out of people's contacts. It got to the point that I was getting 3-500 spams a day on it. After I went to my own domain, I set up separate emails for various email lists and some to register web pages that I may not trust. I now get a few spams on one address that I think the spammer got from the Yahoo Locost site. When it gets too bad, I'll kill that account and make a new one.
When they harvest your address, they'll also use it in the "From" field. That way, when the pissed-off recipient tries to retaliate, it affects you, not the spammer.
Crap like that is why I took great pains on the new Classic and GRM sites to ensure your email is not available on the site. Anywhere.
all I can say... so far it seems only to be in use against Russian Email sites.. hopefully the Russian Mob will not find me
What makes you think they haven't already?
Also make sure that you don't have your email setup as a 'catch all' account. I deal with this all the time at GoDaddy, people calling in with the same issue, in many cases it is a catch all. (puts a wildcard before your @, so that any messages sent to that address get to you). This normally will happen if you have your own custom email, not something with a domain you would not own yourself.
nope, I use earthlink.. but I think I figured out where it happened. I signed up for a regional forum that is little used anymore. Soon afterwards, I started being a "spammer" to Russia. I bet that forum got mined
If your email is publicly available on a forum, it WILL get mined. Think about it... you're spammer: Every forum has a nice member list with THOUSANDS of emails. It's gold.
This happened to me at work for about two days. Then it went away.
well, I just took care of it on that site. Hopefully the spammers will eventually move on in regards to my email.
Funny, pulled my email off of that site.. and I went from 75 returns yesterday to 2 today.
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