Edel SM wrote:
The following mail item, which I allegedly sent (I did not) bounced back to me from PLUG, because the mail item was too big. I never sent this mail to PLUG. I believe that some spam mailer program somewhere got hold of my email address and used it to send this spam mail (possibly carrying a virus?) to many different addresses. How does a ligitimate email address owner prevent his email address from being illegally used like this?
email domain forgery? i think spf & ms caller-id can help you. spf home @ http://spf.pobox.com/
in my network, i always block outbound access to port 25, minimizing spams coming from inside (windows PCs).
It's quite easy to fake the "From:" line once you get a host willing to forward email anonymously (usually old non-updated ones).
The new batch of win2k worms harvest email adds off phone books that might have infected someone you know and use the addresses in that phone book as the From line, minimizing the chance of the next worm mails to be labelled as junk/bulk mail and tricking the receiver to open it.
Also, forwarded email messages (yahoogroups are notorious for this) contain headers which have all the email adds of the people receiving from the forum. This is quite easy to harvest and is fair game for worms and spam bots. You should try trimming your headers if you want to forward this kind of emails. My mailer automatically moves them to my Trash mail directory where I can peruse and delete them. They're mostly junk chain emails and silly Friedster slambook questionaires anyway.
You can mimize exposure by having another email for public forums and newsgroups. Yahoo mail can be good for this now that they have increased their size to 100mb. Try to protect your personal email address. If you have a website try linking an email address to the site I posted earlier (http://www.auditmypc.com/freescan/antispam.html) which generated random email addresses spambots can chew with their heart's content.
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