Spam

From Site5Wiki

Unsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; junk e-mail

— answers.com

—sometimes noted as "UCE"

• Hi-tech crime: A glossary by Mark Ward, Technology Correspondent, BBC News (printable version of this article)
• E-mail Address Harvesting: How Spammers Reap What You Sow, written by the American Federal Trade Commission
• notspam.org ( feed): a blog-related (i.e., comment and trackback spam) anti-spam learning blog by Donncha O'Caoimh, who created and develops WordPress Mu.
• SPAM Playbook: Spam-filtering Tools at networkcomputing.com

Anatomy of a spam e-mail
A daily chore of modern life for many is the morning trawl through a full inbox deleting spam email. But just where does it all come from and why do spammers use bizarre text, names and images in their emails?

— BBC: full article with diagram (printable version of this article)

• weblog.site5: MMM-Tastes-Like-Spam
  

[edit] Why Am I Getting Returned Emails That I Never Sent?

Many spammers and viruses will automatically select random email addresses to send emails out to (to promote their product or to infect people's computers). They will also randomly select addresses in the same way to claim the email is being sent from that address. This is done to make the claimed sender address appear (or actually be) more legitimate and look less suspicious.

Unfortunately, the spammers use open relays (servers that don't require authentication) to send emails through, and viruses often use their own built-in SMTP servers to send the viruses out from. Thus, as the fraudulent emails originate from another source, we have no way to prevent this from happening, nor do you. Note: We require authentication to use SMTP on any of our servers.

Information about the security of your email accounts and our mail service are covered here; This does not in any way indicate that your email has been compromised or that the spammer / virus is sending through or from your email account. Also, as our mail servers are on Linux and don't use MS products, it's impossible for our mail service to be infected with one of these viruses.

If you are unsure if you are infected with a virus, you should obtain the most up to date anti-virus software to run a check on your system just to be safe (especially if you use Outlook on Windows, as that is the most popular email program for email virus writers). Also, you should always use well chosen passwords for your account and email that are not based on dictionary words or are easy to guess or otherwise are simple, which will prevent your email accounts from ever being compromised just for such reasons.

The best method to prevent bounced emails from spammers and viruses, is to disable catch-all email in your NetAdmin control panel. This would consist of logging into NetAdmin, navigating to the "Default Address" area and choosing the default address (as specified on said page) to be ":fail: no such address" (without the "double quotes", of course).

You may also choose to not bounce back an error saying there's no such address to the sender, as the email will likely be a bounce due to delivery issues anyway, and simply set it to ":blackhole:", which will silently discard emails that are addressed to any address other than one's you have set up as POP account addresses or forwarders addresses. Those will still be valid, of course.

If you receive bounces at any existing email addresses (POP or forwarders), you can use the "Spam Filters" feature also located in NetAdmin to filter out and discard any emails with a specific subject or message body. However, be careful to consider what key words and phrases might mistakenly discard legitimate emails or bounces. Thus, it's best to disable catch-all email and simply ignore and delete any bounces you receive due to a spammer or virus.


Related wiki links: BoxTrapper; Email Guide; Hardening; PGP; Spamassassin; Tips to help secure your account