Returned emails that I did not send

[Thomas S. England]

I'm getting a flurry of Mail Delivery System messages, bouncing back email messages that I never sent, addressed to people I've never known.

In the last 24 hours there have been about 25 of these. Here's a sample:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

 nannyb**** @yahoo.com
   SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
   host mta7.am0.yahoodns.net [98.138.112.38]: 554 delivery error:
   dd Sorry your message to nannyb**** @yahoo.com cannot be delivered. This account has been disabled or discontinued [#102]. - mta1035.mail.ne1.yahoo.com

------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------

Return-path: <******@mindspring.com>
Received: from [212.34.12.40] (helo=localhost)
   by elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net with esmtpa (Exim 4.67)
   (envelope-from <*******d@mindspring.com>)
   id 1V5vtq-0005iE-Qq
   for nannyb****@yahoo.com; Sun, 04 Aug 2013 06:51:00 -0400
Date: Sun, 04 Aug 2013 05:39:46 -0500
From: ******@mindspring.com
To: Brenda <nannyb****@yahoo.com>
Subject: Hi Brenda
Message-ID: <E1V5vtq-0005iE-Qq@elasmtp-junco.atl.sa.earthlink.net>

Hey Brenda how are you? Lost 5 lbs, 10 more to go, thank you garcinia! *spam url was inserted here*.  You can get a free trial here










edited at 1:30pm by kimmer to remove that nasty url that seems to not want to go away.

[jchuzi]

It's more likely that a spammer is spoofing your email address, probably having gotten it from somebody else's address book. If that's the case, there's nothing that you can do except wait for the annoying messages to slow down.

[gunug]

What I really don't appreciate is the "nanny-nanny-boo-boo" of getting Spam sent from my email address to my email address!

[rgray]

QUOTE(jchuzi @ Aug 4 2013, 11:18 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It's more likely that a spammer is spoofing your email address, probably having gotten it from somebody else's address book. If that's the case, there's nothing that you can do except wait for the annoying messages to slow down.

What he/she said.

This is an attempt by some rectal-leaking, knuckle-dragging miscreant to get people to click on the link "http: //bit.ly/" and the come-on is weight loss.  The site could as easily be pharmaceutical (usually viagra or cialis) or porn or whatever.

This "person" (and I use the term loosely) is sending a(several) dump mailing(s) to a black-market list and what you are seeing is the returns bounced by bad addresses.  They come to you because you are the (fictional, spoofed) sender.

You have my sympathy.  These black-market address lists can have a million (and more) entries.......

[Xairbusdriver]

This email address harvesting process is a primary reason to never use your favorite/main address for anything but business purposes or a select group of friends. Get as many aliases from whoever your ISP is and use those for registering at public sites (forums, stores, etc.). These aliases should be free, of course. You can probably get (or have) some from DOTmac, DOTme and/or iCloud. It might be worth signing up for Gmail just for the disposable addresses. TMMV!

The above will NOT keep your main/favorite address from being harvested, however. Anyone who gets a message from you and has a less than secure Windows machine (I've heard there are a few of those are still around!), can certainly be invaded and their Address Book harvested. And, if someone included your favorite/main address in either the TO: or CC: field of a message, anyone on THAT group can have your addy harvested. That is why BBC: is the best place to include multiple addresses; other recipients will not see yours.

Once you have had an address harvested (added to a list that gets passed around or even sold), it may be pointless to keep using it. Hopefully, it will be an alias and you can simply delete it and create another. If it is your favorite/main addy, you may want to try waiting until the Internet creatures die or get tired of using it. That may be an extremely long time, close to the half-life of Plutonium, probably.

There are places/sites/agencies where you can report SPAM but I'm not sure they accomplish anything of value and this is not actually SPAM coming to you, it's just SPAM purporting to come from you! Even worse, in my opinion!

It might be nice of you to send emails to anyone who uses that addy and warn them not to click on that link, of course. It also may be too late...