Email spoofing: the basics

Occasionally, you will see email failure or other types of rejection notices in your inbox -- usually quite a few of them at a time. It will look like you've sent an email to a bunch of people -- some of whom you know and some you don't -- and that the email has bounced back to you. This is called email spoofing.

It's not normally a big deal even though it looks like it (though it recently happened in such a huge way that it caused a server-wide email slow-down). This spoofing happens to me pretty much every day with all my various hundreds of email addys (I have "webmaven@" for each of your domains). It happens on every server on a regular basis. Emails are being sent by a spammer using your email address (anyone can do this - you, for example, can put whatever you want in the "reply to" field) to people you don't know and often aren't real addys so you're getting the "bouncebacks." It'll last a week or two and then you won't see it again till it happens again - months or years down the road. I've talked to godaddy and other servers for that matter and you just have to wait it out. The definition on wikipedia is here.

Sorry about it - but it normally is harmless besides the deleting you have to do.

Apols though!

Here is how I deal with the spoofing in my email... and this may or may not work with your email program. But I have everything not sent to an address in my address book get sent to a SPAM folder (within my email program), and that SPAM folder is set up with folders which group things according to the "from." So when I get 90 messages from MAILER-DAEMON they're just accordianned into this folder and thus the spam folder doesn't look all that confusing and long. I always look through the folder several times a day -- and I have it listed by "from" rather than date -- and so it takes less than one minute per time to scroll down and move the stuff I want to my inbox and do a delete of what I don't want.