Common spam issues

Almost all spam has forged headers

Spammers routinely forge or falsify the header information in their messages, and send mail with randomly generated sender and recipient addresses. This results in various types of spam and annoyance e-mail which you might see:

• You may receive spam addressed to random, non-existent e-mail addresses at your domain name.
• You may receive e-mail delivery failure notices that are returned back to you, or to various random addresses at your domain name, for e-mail you know you didn't send.
• You may receive spam that appears to be addressed to someone else entirely.

The vast majority of this mail is sent completely anonymously via unprotected, compromised personal computers belonging to unsuspecting end-users. There are literally millions of such computers on the Internet.

In addition, there are numerous viruses in wide circulation which infect vulnerable computers and replicate themselves by sending mail to any e-mail address they can find on the infected computer. They may also send mail to random email addresses, and use a randomly-chosen e-mail address from the infected computer as the sender address.

Although there is nothing you can do to prevent spammers from forging your email address or domain name, you can prevent randomly-addressed spam and delivery failure notices from reaching your inbox by turning off your catch-all e-mail forwarder, and creating only the specific e-mail addresses you need.