Delivery Failed: New Form of Spam?
Is it just me or are you getting these delivery notification failed spam emails as well? I get about thousands of these past the SpamGuard everyday and it's really annoying to pick out the "real" emails amongst them. What's more is that these emails don't have any links or product advertisements in them so I really don't understand what's their point. I might change the email links on my site to normal text with [at] and such. Any other suggestions?
12 thoughts:
They are probes; they are sent to see if the account is valid (or if it bounces).
A lot of spam is sent with other peoples email addresses in the From field, found on web sites, meaning they get the errors for emails they never sent.
You find that your get a load of delivery errors sent to you then it will stop, until your email address is used in the From field of another spam and then it will start again.
I've had it a number of times, sometimes a year or more after each other.
Try sending a email to a email address you know will not work, so you know what a real delivery error from your SMTP server looks like e.g. Subject line etc, you can then add filters/rules to delete the others knowing that they are not real errors coming back from a email you sent.
such emails arrive, but thanks to gmail's excellent spam filter - they're taken off the inbox and flagged spam :)
I just set my email client to put these things right into the trash.
Steve, how do you set it up?
Hi Ilker,
I had a batch of about 450 on Sunday that were 'returns' from forged email accounts on my domain. Nothing since.
Unfortunately your email address has been harvested by now, so the spammers that sent the emails to all of these people using it as the from address already have it.
As suggested above, the best thing to do is set up rules to trash them. Of course this will trash any real delivery failures as well.
Oh I had plenty of that too.
Didn't do anything about it, one day they just stopped coming...
Ilker, depending on which email client you are using you can have it filter the emails by going to:
Outlook Express/Windows Mail: 'Tools > Message Rules > Mail, click New then tick Where the Subject line contains specific words and Move it to the specified folder, click the blue links and enter each of the subject lines of the emails you would like filtered e.g. 'Delivery Status Notification (Failure)', click Add and repeat and select which folder you want them moved to.
Thunderbird: 'Tools > Message Filters, click New and select Subject, is (enter subject line e.g. 'Delivery Status Notification (Failure)') click + and repeat and Move Message to, Select folder.
You should have the same sort of options in which ever email client/service you are using.
Thanks Zufoo.. that helps a lot! Didn't know about the filter options.
This is interesting. I have an account that gets over run with these as well.
I always thought it was because of the autoresponder responding to a spam message and getting bounced.
I never realized they were probes :(
Yeah me neither.
For those who don't know what a probe is: In e-mail systems, a test mail issued to see if a given mail address actually exists.
I did have these probes as well as regular spam using my own e-mail address as the sender, and surprisingly both at the same time!
I have raised a medium high level of security on my computers, but these were of course not recognized by NAV. I investigated them but they (most probably) didn't contain a worm or anything. The spam e-mail "from myself to myself" did contain a "commercial" offer and some images.
I really hate this kind of spoofing, and I feel embarrassed to imagine that other people may now receive silly, stupid or even offensive e-mail messages in my name.
Zufoo's suggestion to deliberately send an e-mail to a fals address, so that you know for sure it will not work, in order to receive a real Delivery Error Notification and then compare this with the probes and create a filter on the difference(s), is a valuable one, I think. Thank you, Zufoo!
And thank you very much, Ilker, for dropping by on my blog and bringing this post to my attention.
What do you think? Post your thoughts..