Spammers fraudulently using your domain name

Drastic

About a year ago I had several episodes of spammers sending out thousands of emails from forged email addresses using two of my domains. The first I knew of it was thousands - literally - of spam mail bouncing back into my inbox. At the time I had mail forwarding set up so that anything sent to my domain came to me - not just post to correct addresses.

I researched the problem and discovered that:

a) there's not a lot you can do to stop it - if you complain to your ISP or various services you just tend to be told that the spammers will move on to someone else's domain eventually

b) you can reject any mail that does not have a correct address - but all that means is that you don't know when you domain is being abused as you don't get flooded with mail - it doesn't mean the problem has stopped

c) you can set up a SPF record so that any service that checks post against your domain records would be able to tell it is not coming from you. But SPF seems complex to set up when your mail is being sent via your webhost or ISP rather than from your own server, and a large number of ISP's have no support for SPF

I'd be interested to know how many others have had this problem and whether you discovered any better solutions!

Drastic

Traveller

The same thing happened to me about a year ago, as well. I handled it by setting up two domain-wide filters on my email. The first, was a whitelist which listed all of the email addresses that are actually valid on my domain. The second was a filter containing the domain name preceded by a wild card so that any email that was not sent by one of the whitelisted addresses would be rejected.

Check with your hosting to see how/if this may be done. If it's here, on FriHost, stay tuned, and I'll look into so that anyone else who has the same problem can know. Since my Internet was out all last night, then the power went out for most of the day, I'm still catching up on a number of other things, and won't have a good chance to examine this until tomorrow (Thursday).

Of course, if any other Frihoster wishes to look into this before I can, please feel free to do so.

Edit: Okay. I checked DirectAdmin and, unfortunately, even though it IS possible to block email from a domain, there is no way to implement a whitelist. Thus, if your site is hosted here, you will need to implement the whitelist/filter combination through your email client, if possible.