Posted by Tina Peters on 01/20/07 20:06

"J.O. Aho" <user@example.net> wrote in message
news:51f5ksF1jun95U1@mid.individual.net...
> Rob wrote:
>> I hope this question is appropriate to alt.html
>>
>> I brought up my primitive website last week, and ever since, I've
>> been deluged w. email messages from email servers telling me that
>> A.) I sent an email to somebody at the domain served by that email
>> program that has been rejected
>> B.) because either addressee unknown, or the email contained a
>> virus, etc., etc.
>>
>> Is this a consequence of webbots that troll for new websites and
>> flood the universe w. emails that show me as the sender?
>>
>> Is there anything I can do to stop it?
>
> Your feedback/"tell a friend" script is allowing people to inject
> mail-headers, which makes it possible for spammer to use it to send spam
> to people. It don't take them long time to find these forms and when
> someone has found it, it's soon known by hordes of spammers.
>
> Spammers uses others e-mail addresses or fake ones, as they don't want to
> get the mail bounced back at them and there are those spammers who
> delivery send spam to a none working e-mail address, so that your ISPs
> spam-filter won't filter it away, you get the mail and will open it to see
> what mail did fail to be sent and the spammer hope you will read the whole
> mail and then hand over your money to them.

I didn't see where he said he had a form on his site. My guess would be its
a Joe Job attack, where some spammer used the OPs email address as the
"reply to" address, so he's getting all of the undeliverables. We see it
happen all the time. A good rule of thumb to avoid this type of attack is
to not have a "catchall" email account setup, since a lot of the bounces
will end up there.

PS: Regarding the form mail type of attack you mention, we have on that
seems to work pretty good. So far, the spamming robots have ignored it:
http://www.formmailscript.com

--Tina

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