Undeliverable!
Hey, clever computer people! Of late, I have been inundated with this kind of spam: ie. Undeliverable Mail emails, which are clearly triggered by spam that elicits automatic replies from my computer. (I have no knowledge of anything I've switched on that sends out an automatic reply, by the way.) I am, as Mac users will have spotted from the grab, using Mac Mail. The email address they're coming to is this one, the wherediditallgoright.com one, which is why I have to trawl through the Junk inbox, for actual emails from actual people using this site to get in touch, which happens a lot. How do I stop the bad spam from happening? I had bloody hundreds of these yesterday, and I'm getting bored of ploughing through them. However, I am a little man, technically, and some of you, I know from experience, are giants. (Don't advise me to stop using a Mac. I love them and will never change.) Thank you in advance.
posted by Andrew Collins @ 12:24 PM
20 Comments
Contact
Andrew at
20 Comments:
I don't think those are anything to do with emails automatically sent from your account. I have always assumed it's just to confuse people into replying and thus it's to harvest live email addresses.
Hi Andrew, A possible solution here....
http://www.macworld.com/article/59980/2007/09/hijackedemail.html
Good luck
p.s. Macs do indeed ROCK!
Not sure about the 'undeliverable' stuff specifically but you could try using GMail as a spam filter; I do this and even though I get about 900 spam messages a week, only about 1 or 2 ever gets into my inbox, and only once to my knowledge has GMail misidentified a real message as spam.
More details here:
http://lifehacker.com/software/notag/use-gmail-as-a-spam-filter-39422.php
I can't imagine the hassle of sifting through 900 spams a week manually, it'd be like a Monty Python sketch...
Unfortunately there's not a huge amount you can do about them - apart from thank the Gods of the internets that you've not suffered similarly before.
Basically something somewhere has decided to send lots of spam using your domain as a "from:" address (probably someone whose machined is infected with a virus that is designed to send lots of email).
Email needs to look like it came from somewhere and if that somewhere is credible then it's more likely to reach its destination. But the problem is that it's sending to dubious addresses whose domains are fine but which actual account does not exist, so the mailserver is sending the apparent sender a message to tell them that. That apparent sender is you.
So not a huge amount you can do about it. Many mail programs learn about this form of junk, so Mail.app might do that for you in time, otherwise it's trawl-and-delete until the program that's sending this mail in your name moves on.
If you're getting loads of them all at once, then they might be real bounce emails, e.g. if someone has been forging email addresses using your domain as the 'from' in order to send lots of spam mail, then you'll get the undeliverable reports for any bad addresses on the spammers list. I believe this is known as 'backscatter' in the jargon.
Perhaps the simplest thing you could do to make it more manageable on your computer is to create a special rule for moving them into a specified mail folder. You can access the Apple Mail rules through the 'Preferences' menu - because the mails have such a similar pattern of subject lines, you could set a rule on the inbox that moved the majority of them out of your way.
Along similar lines, you could create some 'smart mailboxes' that filter them in / out of view, if your version of Apple Mail supports that feature. Smart mailboxes work quite similarly to rules in how you set them up, but they don't move the emails anywhere, they're really just clever 'saved searches'. Access to these is via the 'Mailbox' menu.
Otherwise you could try and contact your upstream mail server administrator, ( whoever is running the actual email server for your domain ) and try and filter them there, or take it even further - identify the servers that are generating your bounces and perhaps pursue it with the administrators of the mail servers generating them.
Please note, I'm just a spod with an amateur's interest, not a real email expert.
This is most likely caused by some automated spambot using randomly generated email addresses ending in @wherediditallgoright.com as fake sender/reply-to info. This stuff is sent out to, again, randomly generated addresses most of which don't exist, and so the various mail servers out there eventually route the "undeliverable" messages back to your domain.
I don't think you can do much to stop it happening at all, just set up some filters to keep it out of the way, maybe?
Use gmail. I know google are the devil's spawn, but gmail is excellent at dealing with spam, it's the best at it. You can use POP mail to pick up mail from other accounts, like the one you have here, and you can easily create filters to sift out the good from the bad.
I don't know if you still need an invite, if you want one, shout and I (and 3000 other people) will invite you.
http://email.about.com/od/macosxmailtips/qt/et_gmailosxmail.htm
I think that you're getting them because a spam generator has used your email address to cover it's tracks. The only thing I can think of trying is to filter your mail for (say) the word "undelivered" and use that to get rid of everything in one go? That's if you have a filter option with your mail system?
Lee.
Unfortunately there is not much you can do.
The problem is the email system is not a secure one. In non technical terms, you fill out a form, which gets sent from computer to computer until it arrives at its destination.
If you go to the Accounts setting of Mail's preferences you can put any name you want in the email address field, such as that of your colleague Mr Herrin.
One of the things that spammers do is guess email addresses which are likely to exist. The likes of Hotmail, Google Mail, Yahoo! and so on all have thousands of users. And no doubt they will have ones called Andrew or Michael. So there are two addresses worth spamming.
Now spammers, as you probably know, just collect big lists of email address. Some of these they find on web pages, some they just guess. For example Yahoo! has hundreds of email addresses so you can be pretty sure they will have a user called Andrew and another called Michael.
There, without doing anything we have some email addresses to spam. By taking a dictionary and a list of names we have thousands. And as people add their year of birth to usernames that are already taken we could automatically add suffixes. Millions of addresses to spam!
And to that you can add all those email addresses found by searching through web sites.
Now to prevent spam, what some internet providers and email programmes will do is check the sending address is valid before they accept it.
And so the spammers just take one of the addresses they found, and enter that on the 'form'. That way, when the it arrives at its destination, it will check to see that the sender exists, in this case you, and will accept it.
Assuming the recipient exists, that is. If they do not it will send out an undelivered message, and as it thinks the email was from you, it means you get the mess. Which is good for the spammer as not only do they get swamped with all this mess, you also get to see their spam.
Alternatively, it may well just be spam disguised as an undelivered message as a way of making you open it.
So, the main thing to realize is there is nothing you have done wrong, and nothing much you can do about it. It is certainly not a Mac or Apple Mail issue.
(Although looking at the screen shot you are on an older version of OS X, so maybe upgrading is worth considering as presumably the spam filter will be more advanced in Leopard. I moved from Jaguar to Leopard last year and it does seem much better to me.)
My suggestion would be to add a filtering rule in Mail to send undelivered messages to a separate mailbox so it at least keeps them out of your Inbox.
Similarly, look for something which is common to genuine emails and set a filter so they do not get marked as spam. For example, if the text of an email contains 'Andrew' then it is probably sent to you personally. Spammers are automated and so are very unlikely to go to the trouble of trying to decipher you site to be able to find a real name to link to your email address.
Unfortunately I have not got any spam of this sort at the moment, or I would look to see if there are any rules I could suggest to help separate the fake from the real undelivered messages. I am sure some will arrive soon though, so will take a look for you then.
Firstly, they haven't been sent from your computer. They're caused by spam that is sent to non-existant e-mail addresses with your address in the 'from' field, so that the bounce-backs arrived at your inbox.
There's nothing you can do about them, other than to get a better spam filter. You could ask whoever provides your e-mail account (probably the same as whoever hosts your website) to look at improving (or upping) their spam filters, which would hopefully mean they get filtered out before arriving at your inbox.
Unfortunately, the people who design spam filters have to play a constant game of cat and mouse with the spammers though.
The best spam filter I've found is with Gmail (the Google e-mail service). You could switch to using this, whilst keeping your e-mail address, and still using Mac Mail, however it takes a bit of configuration...
I think this is because someone has 'spoofed' your email address. In other words the evil spammers are using your address as the sender of spam email. The messages you are getting are from the spam filters on the servers that are rejecting these messages. Because you are the sender they bounce back to your account. It happens to me too and I use a Mac but that is purely coincidental. Not sure if anything can be done about it mind you beyond contacting your mail provider and seeing what they suggest.
Hi Andrew
Whilst not an answer as such, I have a suggestion you may wish to try. Why not set up a rule, so that any mail containing the text "Undelivered Mail", or "Returned Mail" in the Subject Line gets transferred directly to the trash folder. I believe that Rules are set up within the Preferences section of MacMail.
Hopefully this will save you the painful task of picking these mails out yourself.
Good luck.
Doug.
Note to self: check other comments before posting.
I agree with the other comments above and have a suggestion: rather than publish your email address under "Contact Me" and the bottom of the page (which is really easy for the spammers to find and spoof) have a form for people to contact you, with a captcha (distorted text), much as we do to comment here. People would then only find out your email address if/when you reply making it less visible and therefore less susceptible to spoofing. Recently you kindly replied to my email (from Bangkok) and your reply ended up in my spam folder. This could mean that your "wherediditallgoright" domain has already been tagged by spam filters as a domain that originates spam as described in the comments above (no fault of yours). Maybe if you hide your email address the spam will gradually go away. Or maybe it's time for a new email address (you could set up an auto reply on the old one to tell people to resend to the new one due to spam problems. The auto reply shouldn't reply to the failed delivery notifications). If you do decide on a new email address, it would be best not to be under "wherediditallgoright" which the spam filters currently know as a spamming domain.
Cheers
Tony
You've already got lots of good suggestions so I won't repeat any of them. The only thing I'll say is that it will, eventually, stop. It might take a few weeks, but eventually the spambots who used your address will move on to another. This happened to me and luckily I was on GMail, which caught 99% of them, but even the 1% it didn't catch was really painful. But then, after a few weeks, they just stopped coming. So hang in there.
P.S. I skim-read the other suggestions so apologies if this is old news, but this doesn't mean that anyone has 'hacked' your email, neither does it mean the spammer can read rel email sent to you. So you shouldn't worry about that aspect, just concentrate on trying to filter them.
Basically, Andrew, it's to stop the teams in the second match being able to play strategically based upon the result of the first match...
Oh, hang on.
Andrew - i'd recommend using 'Gmail for your domain'. That way, almost all the spam will be filtered out, and you can either use the gmail.com interface, or continue to use the mail client on your mac.
More info here:
http://www.shoestringbranding.com/2008/02/15/branded-gmail-address/
I had "spam" like this for a bit. I did nothing and then after a week or two it stopped.
You really a fantastic collective resource. I tried adjusting the filter to include words like "undeliverable" etc. but then, for some reason, half of my non-spam emails ended up in the Trash, so I was still having to trawl before deleting. I've switched back to how it was before, as - you were right - the flood has abated all by itself. It's nice to know I haven't been compromised individually. I would look into GMail, but Google know enough about me already and they may well be the next world government after the crash.
One extra thing to try. You might have a 'catch-all' address set, so that any email that goes to your domain goes to your inbox. That's generally a bad idea, and can exacerbate floods like this. Investigate and turn off, if you can.
Post a Comment
<< Home