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106 Comments
- snowshoeless, on 05/04/2008, -1/+38thank you for this -- I have been getting backscattered for the last few weeks every now and again and had no idea why. The spammers were using non-existent email addresses from a server of mine and I'd get all bouncebacks. I've since updated my settings.
Thanks! - AgentVladimir, on 05/04/2008, -5/+34Sounds more like an obscure sexual practice than a spamming method.
- inactive, on 05/04/2008, -1/+23So to the estimated 1.5 million people who paid these ***** money, ***** you very much! Fools!
- damndj, on 05/04/2008, -0/+17I experienced this for the first time over the past 2 weeks. I use GMAIL and usually get about 100 spam messages a day, 99% of which get caught by the spam filter. I started to notice I was getting hundreds of emails in a short amount of time and noticed my spam box was filled with thousands of bounced back messages. Looking at the headers it was clear someone put my return address in the FROM line.
I used to work for MindSpring internet services and I sometimes took calls from customers also having this problem. Like this article says, not much you can do unfortunately as a user. - SarahC, on 05/04/2008, -1/+16If you bounce-back, you're doing it right!
- inactive, on 05/04/2008, -0/+13Congress can't do ***** about spammers, PERIOD.
- AdHavoc, on 05/04/2008, -4/+16Is this like an archived article from the 90s?
- Black6x, on 05/04/2008, -1/+13Slight difference. Spoofing is where they make it look like they are sending the email from another address (which they are doing in this case). However, backscattering is the unwanted after effect to the owner of a real email address that has been spoofed.
- inactive, on 05/04/2008, -1/+12What kind of a stupid ***** would buy something off a spam e-*****-mail anyways? Does spamming really work as a marketing tool?
- drlha, on 05/04/2008, -0/+11Congress can't do ***** about spammers abroad.
- rabbitt, on 05/04/2008, -1/+11eh? wrong. The process of using your email address to send spam is spoofing - but when the spam emails bounce they are called backscatter. burying you as lame and without a proper clue.
- InetRoadkill, on 05/04/2008, -0/+9Much of the spam originates here in the US and is distributed by ISPs who are willing to turn a blind eye towards their clients activities. I'm all for making the life of spammers as difficult as possible.
- Mononuclear, on 05/04/2008, -0/+8I have had this problem on and off for a long time. It isn't that they are using my email address though. They are using random emails at my domain like dsfije@domain.com and of course I have the domain setup to catch all emails at the domain and if they aren't set to a user forward them to me. This is good so that I can track web signups using a unique email for each one, using a different address for friends, work, web work, etc. The bad part is that when a spammer decides to use my domain to send spam I get thousands of bouncbacks.
- PabloMac, on 05/04/2008, -0/+8"You need to stop sleeping with the family dog, son. Now come on up for breakfast."
- Chongo, on 05/04/2008, -0/+8Its happening to me right at this moment. I'm getting about 50 an hour.
Strange that this article comes out right as this is happening?
I think PC world is behind it! - the-Jer, on 05/04/2008, -1/+8This has been happening for a long time. With out the enforcement of using a system like OpenSPF or SenderID this will continue to happen.
- aywwts4, on 05/04/2008, -0/+7Spamming is also absurdly cheap and mostly automated. So you don't need that many suckers to make a profit.
- inactive, on 05/04/2008, -0/+7Congress can't do *****, PERIOD. I can picture them signing the spams they are receiving as new legislature without reading it first. Sad.
- inactive, on 05/04/2008, -0/+7Yup, spammers only exist because there are so many stupid people out there. If it wasn't profitable, there wouldn't be spam.
- theOster, on 05/04/2008, -0/+7isn't this just email spoofing with the recipient server sending back NDRs - this tech has been used for years. however, i will say that in the past month or so me and alot of people at my office have been getting these. i'm wondering what's new in teh spammer arsenal that theres been such an increase lately...
- jsully, on 05/04/2008, -0/+7It's also known as a Joe Job
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job - amida, on 05/04/2008, -0/+6I wish you could make a filter on gmail that would kill "bounced" messages that had no sent equivalent. Seems like it would be really simple to do.
- kakwakas, on 05/04/2008, -1/+7Why? So they can move to offshore servers?
- ArielMT, on 05/04/2008, -0/+6"As your duly 'lected Senator, I'm pleased to announce that on its way to the President's desk is a bill to help the poor, deposed Prince of Nigeria contribute fifty million pounds sterling, which I've been assured is a lot of money in American dollars, to paying down the national debt and closing the trade gap between Nigeria and the United States. We can only hope that more nations with whom we have strong trade relations follow in Nigeria's bold lead."
- inactive, on 05/04/2008, -2/+7[edit] 150 million. ***** that's half of America. oh lol could it be true?
- Spanktacular, on 05/04/2008, -0/+5This has been happening to me, to the tune of 200+ messages a day, for a couple of weeks now. Good to know I was pretty much correct in my assumption that my address had been spoofed.
- griz, on 05/04/2008, -0/+5And besides, who is going to enforce this? Just something else for the government to spend money on when we have bigger problems. Spam can be cured by technology, not legislation.
- rabbitt, on 05/04/2008, -0/+5Based on the content, you'd think so - but amazingly enough it's not. I'm surprised it doesn't even mention SPF or DomainKeys though - seems a bit remiss of them to leave out two important tools like those. The story is definitely not getting a digg from me.
- Jayg28, on 05/04/2008, -0/+5This happened to my wife's email account. I tried to explain what was happening, but she was convinced our home PC was "infected with something" and got pissed at me because I wouldn't fix it.
- Ryosen, on 05/04/2008, -0/+5I've been getting bouncebacks over the past few weeks that have numbered in the thousands. The majority of the IPs have resolved to China and Russia.
- aladrin, on 05/04/2008, -0/+5I'm using SPF on my Google-hosted domain and it happens to me anyhow.
- shifty2, on 05/04/2008, -0/+5you must be completely retarded. Do you think these guys actually give a flying ***** about spoofed emails in their names? I'm 99.9% sure you are getting an automated message from them.
And do you actually think they have a dedicated team of people tracking down spammers?
Also the DEA probably knows that they cannot do anything about the spammers because the actual product either does not exist or its originating from another country. - MadOgre, on 05/04/2008, -0/+4Happening to me too... for the last 3 weeks or so. Tracing back the sources, it looks like most of it is coming from Russia.
That being said, not much I can do about it.
But I think it should be perfectly legal to viciously beat down and tar and feather any spammer or hacker. Put a bounty on those jackholes. Make it worth my while to travel to where they are, thrash them and their computers, and face zero repercussions? I would SO freaking go do it. It would be like the end of Jay and Silent Bob. Are you...? - kmartshopper, on 05/04/2008, -0/+4This has gotten pretty bad lately (I administer a lot of client networks). We typically use GFI for mail filtering, but what I've found particularly helps is enabling an SPF record and then doing SPF filtering on incoming mail. Messages of these types are instantly blocked in doing so. Huge pain if you don't/can't have an SPF record though (we moved everyone off Network Solutions for that reason as most use their domain provider to provide DNS and NetSol won't do SPF records).
- ultrafez, on 05/04/2008, -0/+4That's so scary... it's happening right now to me as well, I'm getting about the same amount!
A lot of my bouncebacks are coming from Barracuda Spam Firewall, their firewall software must be pretty popular... - DoorFrame, on 05/04/2008, -0/+4They wouldn't notice.
- priyankvira, on 05/04/2008, -0/+4I have been experiencing this problems for months now. Haven't found any real solutions to this problem. ******* spammers.
- el_taco, on 05/04/2008, -0/+4THERE SHOULD BE NO BOUNCEBACKS IN THE FIRST PLACE!!
sorry for the yelling. - VenTatsu, on 05/04/2008, -0/+4Those would not help stop backscatter. Backscatter works because a *rejected* email gets bounced back from a legitimate email server. OpenSPF and SenderID only help reject the original email, the bounce email will still appear to be from a valid sender.
The real fix is that servers need to fix how they bounce messages. Don't bounce spam, if you have to bounce a message strip the body of the original so it's no longer a valuable spam payload. - xenlab, on 05/04/2008, -0/+4Yeah, same here. To combat this, I set up a suspended account (no delivery) and add the user that is getting backscattered as an alias.
- shifty2, on 05/04/2008, -1/+5depends, my dick is bigger and i'm not depressed and don't suffer from social anxiety issues.
- jcaino, on 05/04/2008, -1/+5This is nothing new - its simply spammers forging the from or reply-to address in their mailings and has been going on for a while. The e-mail protocol is seriously broken and unfortunately, there's no real good quick-fix solution.
Not to mention SpamCop, RoadRunner, Frontbridge all suck. They see bouncebacks as spam. Takes only a few seconds to actually check the originating IP of the original message. SpamCop is a PITA. - aywwts4, on 05/04/2008, -0/+3Exactly, stealing American tech jobs and moving them overseas!
- AdHavoc, on 05/04/2008, -1/+4What, don't you like V14GR4!!!1!!!?
- Anonymous3, on 05/04/2008, -0/+3I know what you mean, maybe the users could bug google into implementing an anti-scatterback thing, to check if you actually sent the email that warranted a 'delivery failed' email.
If anyone wants to live dangerously and not be told that anything bad has happened (this can work both for and against you, i.e. getting rid of the scatterback stuff, but also getting rid of useful messages that)
settings -> filters -> create new ->
subject contains: Delivery Status Notification
action: delete it
Not that I condone people shooting themselves in the foot... - Kanidia, on 05/04/2008, -0/+3I'm pretty sure that if almost everyone gets spam, someone will click on a link for sure. Maybe it works less nowadays with the built in email filters in every program and service. I'm actually glad that these anti-phishing features are now built into most browsers, and anti-spam built into most services. I used to worry that my parents might get scammed by those things.
- amb001, on 05/04/2008, -2/+5It's been happening to me for quite some time, and well when I got a spam message from myself regarding Viagra and Cyalis, I simply sent it to the DEA and explained that they were using my e-mail to sell drugs without the prescriptions required by law in the United States. I also have been getting UK Lottery notifications from info@microsoft.com. I tried to send it to Microsoft to make them aware that their ISP was being used for this practice, but apparently they don't want to do anything about it which leads me to believe that Microsoft is responsible for a lot of it. They sent me back an e-mail educating me on what spam is, instead of providing me with an address to forward the mail to so that they could trace where it actually came from. When I wrote back to clarify, I got another e-mail from Microsoft which read like a response from a member of Congress which still did not ask for the e-mail to be forwarded so that they could trace it, but rather that they "vigorously investigate and work hard to wipe out spam." If they were so "vigorous" or even tenacious, then logically they would have asked that the e-mail be forwarded to them.
- ultrafez, on 05/04/2008, -0/+3I'm in exactly the same situation as you, I have catch-all enabled on my domain name so all emails go to my Gmail account... including all of the bounceback messages that were apparently sent from some garbage address @ my domain name. I really hate spam!
- OpaqueMurdock, on 05/04/2008, -0/+3I hesitate to suggest it because people seem fearful at any suggestion of change to open systems like email and thats understandable. But this sort of thing seems to point out to me that the system and protocols for email themselves are very outdated and exploitable. I don't believe they were ever intended to be used in the way we now use them. Isn't it time we consider a complete rework of email? Maybe this is going on and I am just unaware.
- ThadeusMaximus, on 05/04/2008, -0/+3Felt the effects on this on March 1, over 1700 bounce backs over the course of 4 hours. I was quite amazed by this, I have gotten small amounts of backscatter/Joe Job before but never at this level. I finally had to kill to the two email aliases that where being used.
Have to admit though, the amount of spam I get has drastically gone down, I may reactivate the alias to see if it is still happening in a month or two. -
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