Thread: Suddenly getting huge quantities of junk mail

I don't know if anyone has any ideas, but I am suddenly getting massive quantities of junk mail. Over 300 this morning alone. This started about a week ago. Everything had been fine for several years prior to that.

They are nearly all 'Delivery Status Notification (Failure)' type messages.

They are not just in English, but pretty much any language including Japanese, Chinese etc

Does anyone have any idea why this has suddenly started and what I can do to stop it?

Sorry - forgot to add - my domain name is www.1staid4fencing.com but the email that is affected is for my sub domain www.1staid4homes.com.

Since I sent my 1st message the spam has risen to 1200 mails and they are still coming in.

Over 700 have been caught by my spam filter and over 400 have arrived in my mail box.

Any ideas?

Hi Tim, good to talk to you. Hopefully you can sort this problem out now

Darren

its because you have a clickable email front and center on your webiste...that you did nothing to RIDDLE it or hide it and they simply hacked into it and sent their own mail

Karen

Me thinks i have said this more than once "NEVER" place your email address text or linked on your website. Remove it straight away and go HERE OR
Use a Form of of some type ( Flash or php ) that you can restrict the input into the edit boxes, use validation on the editboxs also have some sort of captcha system.

Some other pro's and con's
An automated method to attack automated e-mail address harvesters involves List poisoning, a technique that may fill the harvested lists with dynamically generated fake e-mail addresses, thus theoretically rendering the harvested list useless.
On an individual level, users who post e-mail addresses on websites can use Address munging to make it harder to harvest. For example by changing "bob@example.domain" to "bob at example dot domain" to keep the address from being harvested by simple bots. Putting email addresses in images instead of plain text is another technique.
A method that can be implemented on a website, is to provide a contact form instead of an e-mail address. The contact form provides a textarea for the message, and an input for the sender's e-mail address. The server-side script that processes the posted form data, is then responsible for sending the actual message, which means that the e-mail address of the recipient is never exposed. Note that contact forms have other drawbacks: the user cannot use his preferred e-mail client to compose the message, and insecure contact forms may be subject to other types of automated abuse, such as bots that post spam via the form.
A method that can be implemented at the recipient email server for combatting directory harvesting attacks is to reject all e-mail addresses as invalid from any sender that has specified more than one invalid recipient address, however this carries a risk of legitimate email being blocked too.

For CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 harvesting protection, operators of web sites and online services should include a notice that the site or service will not give, sell, or otherwise transfer addresses maintained by such website or online service to any other party for the purposes of initiating, or enabling others to initiate, electronic mail messages.