Hi guys!

Recently I've been getting several returned emails from Mailer-Daemons. The issue I have is that I haven't sent any mail to the addresses that are kicking back to my account. Obviously, someone is using my domain to send spam out.

I don't want this issue to lead to SPAM problems for me or TCH. Is there any way to prevent this practice?

Thanks

More than likely someone is spoofing your address rather than actually sending out from your account. If you have concerns that it might be sent from your account you should submit a Help Desk ticket and include the full headers from one of the bounce messages so that they can look and see where the actual email originates.

There's not a lot you can do to prevent it from happening assuming the email is coming from other locations with a forged envelope (sender). SPF records can help prevent them from being delivered to a recipient, but the bounces you are limited to either filtering them out, disabling the mailbox, or just accepting them and deleting them if the volume isn't too bad.

One domain I'm responsible for is currently receiving these bounces from forged spams on the order of millions. The lawsuit threats are somewhat humorous (because they have no case). But it's still no fun to deal with.

This looks like a case of mail header spoofing. Its easy for anyone to use some SMTP server to which he has access to and send out mails with the From header set to anything@anything.com. So that bounces go to that address. The headers are spoofed to reflect a mail account on your domain and in case it is sent out to bogus addresses, the mail would bounce back to you. There is no ready solution to spoofing of mails because its easy to do this and is quite prevalent.

You are advised to set mails to the default account to be deleted (disable catch-all), and only use your valid mailboxes for all purposes. This will greatly reduce the possibility of random returns due to mail header spoofing. Apart from that, you can use Spam assasin and spam box to move such mails to a separate folder on the server.

KIndly check out http://www.totalchoicehosting.com/forums/i...showtopic=19904 and other such threads on how to counter spam.