RELATED TOPIC: How To Fight Spam & Eliminate 99% of your spam

PROBLEM: I am receiving spam email and it shows it is coming from my domain name? Is your mail server compromised?

Our mail servers are NOT the problem. We commonly get asked this question though. It could be one of two things:

  1. You have a virus on your local computer and it is sending out spam emails in the background without you knowing it. If you think it may be this, update your antispam software virus definitions and run a full thorough scan for viruses.
  2. The most common cause.. a spammer has forged your email address in an outgoing spam list.

Spam Forgery

How Spam Forgering Works

This can happen to anyone and will happen to everyone eventually. This is a spammer that sends out a massive spam to thousands of users. The problem a spammer faces is that some email addresses he is sending to will no longer exist and he does not want to receive all the bounce back messages. So what the spammer does is set the "Reply Email" address in his email client software to either:

  • a real email address at your domain
  • or a fake email address at your domain.

How do they get my email address?

Ninety nine percent of the time spammers get your email address in two ways:

  • from your website or another website/forum you posted to
  • it is a commonly used email name such as info@, sales@ billing@ webmaster@ etc.

If to a real email address you have: This way YOU receive all the bounce messages not the spammer.

If to a fake email address: you do not know the spammer has done this because you will not receive the bounce emails and either will the spammer. Chances are spammers have done this to you many times and you never know it.

 

There is nothing that can be done about this other then maybe changing your email address to stop receiving all the bounce messages.

This recently happened to Miditech in fact. A spammer used ALL the email addresses he found on our website and sent a massive spam list out. Our email became useless and overwhelmed. We had to delete all email addresses and create all new email addresses for our company. We lost no customer emails throughout the process by the way. We also do not place the new email addresses on our website anymore where spammers can get them from.

See our How To Fight Spam article for more helpful ways to thwart the efforts of spammers and to see a way to eliminate 99% of your current incoming spam!