I’m still getting flooded with those stupid Swen virus e-mails, as is half the planet apparently, but now I have a new spam menace to contend with as well.
In an effort to bypass filters and pose as legitimate e-mail, spammers are sending out e-mails with legitimate From: addresses. If you were to connect to the MX record’s mail server for that person and verify the address you would find that it does in fact exist. Unfortunately, it’s not the person who actually sent the spam… The spammers have huge lists of e-mail addresses they can send to, and they can pose as people on that list as well.
My e-mail address appears to have gotten on one of these lists, so now some people are receiving spam messages that appear as though they are being sent by me. Not only that but it’s the address of my private mailbox, which I had set up separate from a public one specifically to avoid spam. It got leaked somewhere along the way, though it’s hard to tell where.
Not only do I get the blame for these spam messages, but the errors regarding full mailboxes (fairly common with this Swen virus filling peoples’ mailboxes), nonexistent users and domains, etc. all get bounced back to me. Now I’m constantly cleaning viruses out of my public mailbox and error messages out of my private one. I really need to set up those filters…
This ought to be illegal, if it isn’t already. At the very least it’s identity theft for them to send e-mail using my address.