dhanna Posted February 20, 2004 Share Posted February 20, 2004 I am curious. Recently I have seen that the spam I have been receiving appears to come from me. If you look at the header it will be like this... From: me[at]mydomain.com <spammer[at]spoofeddomain.com> To: spammer[at]spoofeddomain.com <me[at]mydomain.com> Is this an attempt on the spammer to identify me in reports submitted to spamcop? I am curious, I do not want to get many more spam because of the spammer using this tactic to identify reporters. Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wazoo Posted February 20, 2004 Share Posted February 20, 2004 The forging of the From: address is / has been one of the current spammer tricks, one way to get around most folks' filters, and of course, deflecting complaints to someone other than themselves. Unless you can figure out how to actually track the spammer down and manage to press some kinds of charges, the usual advice is to sit it out ... it usually runs its course, then some other poor soul gets to be the alleged source ... catch is which spammer you've got using your address in this run .. you might see a few hundred, but others have had to suffer thousands of them a day ... One of the issues in the SpamCop parser is that although there is an attempt to mung out your address, there can be no sure guarantee that it gets munged everywhere ... (and admitted that it only looks for a clear text form of the address anyway, so if spammer has it encrypted elsewhere, it's a known thing that it won't be munged there ... this the reason for the relatively new "mole" reporting status) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
turetzsr Posted February 20, 2004 Share Posted February 20, 2004 ...My guess is that there's a simpler explanation: the spammer isn't (necessarily) trying to identify you as the spam source to SpamCop (as dhanna proposed) or cause you to appear to be the source of spam to other people (as Wazoo proposed), but just to get through a whitelist, or just because their spamware makes it easy for them to spoof the "From" address as one of the e-mail addresses from the "To" line. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tmr Posted February 20, 2004 Share Posted February 20, 2004 Sympathetic to dhanna's complaint... I am new to spamcop, but so far (1 week) am pleased by a cleaned up version of my mail. I find some emails, successfully filtered out by spamcop, that appear to be FROM me TO me. The header info shows the same pattern as stated by dhanna. Being new to all of this, I don't have the lingo down to understand all of Wazoo's response. My question is: what can I expect if, in fact, a zillion people are getting spam that appears to originate from my email address? I am taking some comfort in turetzsr's response. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wazoo Posted February 20, 2004 Share Posted February 20, 2004 You can expect that at least three quarters of those zillions of folks will know that your address has been forged and just handle the spam as normal. However, there are going to be folks out there that will be just silly enough to trust what they see and send you a note advising you of their unhappiness of receiving your garbage in their InBox .... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff G. Posted February 20, 2004 Share Posted February 20, 2004 You will also find that many of those email addresses the spammer sent to will be no good, and will bounce. You will get the bounces. Please see FAQ Entry: Why am I getting all these bounces? for details. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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