Josh ([info]cardinalsin) wrote,
@ 2007-11-27 21:42:00
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Current mood: full of too much food

Help!
For a while spam wasn't a problem on my vapourspace email address. Then maybe a year or two ago I started getting annoying spam messages, which I began to filter out using outlook's message rules. This has recently got to the point where I'm filtering out perhaps 100 messages a day, and substantially slowing my downloading.

As a result, I'm thinking of moving to a better provider, who can spamassassin the stuff before it hits my connection.

However I've just started getting another few hundred messages a day which appear to be autoreplies of various kinds, apparently responding to spam sent from my address. Now, there's no evidence from my sentbox that it's actually being sent from my computer, and I suspect it's just the address being spoofed.

Is there anything I can do to stop this, or is the best I can hope for to block the zillions of emails I'm getting as a result?


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[info]undyingking
2007-11-27 10:22 pm UTC (link)
It's called joe-jobbing if done deliberately, or backscatter if done randomly. If your address is on a spam list, eventually it will get used for backscatter too. And no, unfortunately there is no way to stop it. Ideally, recipients' hosts wouldn't mindlessly return bounce messages to obvious spams, but even that seems too much to hope for.

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[info]ao_lai
2007-11-28 07:32 am UTC (link)
You could ask your ISP... Demon has some setting that when set pre-emptively bins all delivery failure notices (I think, it's been a while) that I had to set for precisely that reason.

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[info]wimble
2007-11-28 10:06 am UTC (link)
Spamassassin can stop this kind of thing, to an extent.

First, it's got a remote spam-checking service. Users can report an email as spam to a central repository, and then other clients can check their mail against that repository. That does pick up messages that are sufficiently duplicated around the net. (See http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/HashSharingSystem )

Of course, the other thing it'll do is create a Bayesian analysis system. This will cheerfully start classifying any email you get with the word viagra as spam, after you've warned it about the first few. Doesn't matter to the Bayesian part of the system whether it's a bounce or not. (However, there are other factors, so you could classify bounces as generally more or less likely to be spam than real messages).


I think it's possible to run SpamAssassin on your windows machine, filtering the email that your provider has collected, although I've never looked at this (I run mine on a linux box at home). http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/UsingOnWindows may help.

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[info]onebyone
2007-11-29 10:28 pm UTC (link)
Backscatter should be relatively easy to identify - it's a "delivery failed" notification (recognisable by subject-line) to a message which you didn't send (recognisable by the message-id of the original message).

So it should not be difficult in principle to accurately block it without having to block all delivery failure notifications. Might require a higher-tech email host than you currently have, though.

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