Internet Defense Technologies

This is most likely a spammer who has randomly selected your email address as the return path and/or from for outbound spam.

In this case you will likely be receiving non delivery reports (NDRs) generated by the outbound spam traffic.

Unfortunately since the spammer is almost certainly using network resources not under your email provider’s control (like Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, etc.), short of analyzing traffic and attempting to track it down to the source networks which will most likely lead back to a group of diverse, compromised computers, (not a recommended good use of your time), the best option is probably to define a message rule. Locate something common but unique about the NDRs so that they are automatically moved into a separate folder or simply deleted.

These NDRs are not themselves spam and thus they are unlikely to get blocked by existing spam blocking measures.

Eventually the spammer will select some other address to use.

Note: you would have more options to block this sort of thing if you had domain based email, particularly your own domain under your control, then you could contact your hosting company for assistance blocking the traffic, or use any number of domain-based antispam services such as Total Mail Defense.

Additionally, domain based email accounts are generally less likely to be subject to this sort of abuse, although it can happen to any email address.

Answer written by Founder, Chairman and CTO, Ron Edison

Email spam is just one form of spam. Unfortunately any channel in which communication can flow, gets spam put on it.

Join any social media site and soon you will find people spamming you. Luckily, it is easier to unfriend someone who spams you on social media sites.

What I would recommend is when someone spams you on social media sites there are two courses to take:

1) If it isn’t someone you know well, just a business acquaintance who you won’t miss, unfriend them immediately. Hopefully they will figure it out when they start lossing friends all over the place that they shouldn’t be abusing the network.

2) If it is someone you know better and would like to be connected to, respond back to them and tell them you don’t want their spam and this is their warning. If they do it a second time, then unfriend them.

Wish email spam was as easy.

So with the holiday season quickly approaching many retailers and fighting for those few dollars you have to spend.

There will be a lot of email being sent, some of it from companies you trust, some from those you have never heard of before. Some of these companies know and understand the spam rules, some do not know or choose to ignore them.

Some of these companies may actually be sending you coupons and other incentives to buy through them (and some of these you may actually want).

Additionally, the spammers for all those lovely drugs and pictures and such will be using the holidays in their subject lines and other ways trying to get you to open the email.

What to do in this storm?

First, tell your email program not to view images automatically. This way you won’t accidentally download something while opening images.

Read the sender’s email address and make sure it looks for real. The email address should end in the name of the companies website.com (like sears.com, costco.com and such).

Unfortunately this isn’t always the case and some legitimate email comes from other addresses. So, if you look at the sender’s email address and it looks funny, but you ARE expecting the email from that company (you signed up for them), go ahead and look at the email (with the images off).

If you aren’t expecting the email and the address looks funny, delete it.

If you have gotten far enough along to open the email now read through it and see where it links out. Before clicking the link put the mouse cursor over it and then look at the bottom of your email program where an address should be written out.

Only click on the link it is going to the actual website. DO NOT click on it if it goes via another website or look similar but is in fact a trick (like sears.cr.com or something). If the address looks funny, go straight to the website yourself without clicking on the link.

With many people’s pocket books getting thinner this year we need to be careful with where we buy stuff from and make sure we don’t get caught by spammers.

Well, the spammers are definitely up on their news. They do seem to do a pretty good job of keeping track of what is talked about and trying to use it to their advantage.

Of course, if you haven’t heard that Barack Obama is our new president elect, then you might have been living under a rock.

However, as a heads-up, the spammers are using his name all over their subject lines to try and get people to click on the email and open it.

My advice as always, don’t click on the email and get your news from the right sources. Go straight to your favorite real news source (CNN, Yahoo News, Google news, MSNBC or whatever) and read up there.

Some links for you:
http://www.itbrief.co.nz/
http://www.abc3340.com/news/
http://pandalabs.pandasecurity.com/
http://tech.yahoo.com/news/

Most people who send emails don’t really understand all the pieces and ways you can send an email.

You can send an email “To:” someone or “CC:” someone or even “BCC:” them.

CC is a hold over of terminology from the good old days when you had to use a piece of carbon copy to make a duplicate of something (before copiers were widespread).

So when you CC someone you are making a copy for them to read.

BCC means a blind carbon copy, you know when you gave some data to a co-worker but sent a copy of the communication to your boss so he would know where that person got it from.

When sending an email you should utilize all of these different fields.

The biggest mistake I have seen done on this is when someone tries to forward an email to a large number of their address book and they put everyone in the “To:” or “CC:” fields.

I have spoken of this before most recently in my post Forwarding Warning or Alarming Emails, but the fact holds true even when sending one of those cute emails to your friends to make them laugh.

When you put everyone in the “To:” or the “CC:” then everyone gets to see everyone’s email address. Now maybe you feel your friends wouldn’t abuse the messages, but if they ever get hacked and someone else looks for all the addresses they know, you have just exposed all your friends.

So be sure to use your email fields correctly, to protect your friends.