Jump in ‘failed delivery’ spams
p2pnet news | Off Topic:- I get well over 1,000 fake emails every day, particularly on jon @ p2pnet dot net.
I screen this addie as best I can, but inevitably, one or two genuine emails get trashed along with the garbage, for which I apologise.
At any rate, yesterday I noticed a significant jump in the number of Returned mail: see transcript for details failed delivery items.
There are always a few of these interspersed with the usual scam-mails, but on Thursday there were far more than usual, and this morning, my first look at jon @ p2pnet dot net revealed more than twice the amount of the usual crap with Mail Delivery System-type junk making up most of the difference.
Strange.
Any ideas why this is happening —- and has anyone else noticed the same thing?
Just asking 
Cheers!
Jon
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April 11th, 2008 at 10:13 am
It has happened to me as well. I think it just depends on what email address spammers decide to put in the from field that day. If my experience is any indication, things should go back to normal shortly.
April 11th, 2008 at 10:57 am
This is known as backscatter spam. There are two possibilities:
1) A spammer who is frustrated at you is using your email address in the from part of spams he or she sends out or
2) a spammer is taking advantage of email servers’ tendency to send back an error message when a message does not go through. This allows the spam to carry the statuse of email server messages and therefore are usually allowed through antispam filters.
April 11th, 2008 at 11:06 am
^^ Thanks.
Meanwhile, it’s getting worse. Now penis pill spam and guaranteed authentic fake watches are in the minority
Cheers!
April 11th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
I have this problem because I have my own domain, and choose to receive all mail for it. I notice that the spam for made-up addresses (the
spammers pick something, and then if it doesn’t fail at smtp time they think it’s valid) can be very sporadic. Especially bounces! I filter on sender as “Mail Delivery System” or “postmaster@” or “Mailer-daemon@” and it catches most of them for automatic trash. The spammers take less effort to randomise the “from” address, so it varies more. For example, I had 28 such bounces on 2008-03-31, but the next day, 2008-04-01 I had 1,219.
I believe that there are only a few REALLY BIG spam-bot-nets. Lots of computers, but few identities behind them.