In the last couple of days I've had a lot of "mailer-daemon" emails landing in my inbox. At first I thought someone had been using my website to send spam but when I checked more carefully I found that the emails themselves are spam. It's a way of spammers getting round the email filters and getting the recipient to open the email. I don't know if anyone else has ever been under this kind of attack but I can't be the only one. How can I stop this happening?
"mailer-daemon" isn't this the same thing when you send a mail and it fails (either because of wrong email or any other reason)? I am getting upto 20 spam emails daily and still thinking to make some filters
The genuine mailer-daemon arrives when you send an email and it fails. When you start getting a number of these every day and you haven't sent anything from that email address it's time to look a bit more closely at the email. Apparently other people have started getting these as well.
i havent yet. but i have blocked many email addresses which send spam, could send them via pm to anyone that needs them.
I know right, Mailer-daemon when you send an e-mail to a person whose account doesn't exist then it bounce back.
If spammers are using your email as the return address then you will get the bounces and giovanni might well have blocked your email address However, blocking email addresses is pointless because email addresses in the headers are never the source of the problem. Spammers stopped using their real email address in olden days -- before 2004 . Sometimes spammers send their messaages disguised as bounces, but that is pretty rare. The only defense is anti-spam filtering. Your ISP might offer some options. If you control your mail server, you should investigate available options. I filter out over 300 spam a day, which is double what it was in November. By the end of the year, I expect to be filtering out over 500 a day. You will likely go through the same experience and ought to invest in filtering. I now recommend four basic strategies. Never put your email address on your website. Never give out your email address to anyone other than family or friends. Get a gmail or similar account for all other purposes and turn on spam filtering. This will not prevent spam from reaching your personal account, but it will limit it. If you control your mail server, use forwarders to create email addresses for specific uses and companies. This will tell you who is selling email addresses and who is not.
My web host has had a look at some of these emails and he thinks it's just spam. I've put controls on my mail server to stop it happening.