Large number of bounced emails that appear to be spam?
Posted on January 30th, 2010 by admin
Yesterday afternoon I started to receive a flood of emails to my yahoo premium email account. Most are out of office replies or postmaster and mailer-daemon messages saying the email that I sent cannot be accepted. The email message is being sent from my domain name but it is a fabricated address that I have not created. It’s clearly spam as the subject is "Melt away the pounds".
Has this happened to anyone else and is there anything you can do to stop this?
Spam is any message or posting, regardless of its content, that is sent to multiple recipients who have not specifically requested the message. Spam can also be multiple postings of the same message to newsgroups or list servers that aren’t related to the topic of the message. Other common terms for spam include UCE (unsolicited commercial email) and UBE (unsolicited bulk email).
The individuals who send spam are typically people who purchased or harvested a list of email addresses. They send messages from numerous different addresses to all areas of the Web. These messages tend to be "forged," to hide who actually sent them.
All mail originating from Yahoo! has an originating IP address embedded in the full address headers. This address helps to identify the sender of the email and track the individual to his or her service provider. If a message appears to be from Yahoo! but the originating IP line is absent, then it is not really from Yahoo!.
Yahoo is committed to eliminating spam—eyuck! And you’ve got great tools to help keep spam out of your Inbox.
Yahoo! SpamGuard
Keep Yahoo! SpamGuard turned on. To check if it’s on:
Click Options in the upper-right corner of your Mail page.
Click Spam Protection from the list on the left.
In the “Spam Filter” section, do you see “SpamGuard is ON”? If not, turn it on by clicking the link: Turn SpamGuard ON.
In the area above your spam options, click Save Changes.
In this same section, you can also specify how often you’d like us to empty your Bulk folder (we do it automatically once a month, but you have options to empty it faster), as well as indicating your preference for showing—or blocking—images. Image blocking is another way to fend off spam!
Image Blocking
Keep Image Blocking on. Image blocking defeats the “hits” spammers receive whenever one of their images is “viewed”—which can include the moment you select a spam message before you click Spam. Here’s how to block images:
Click Options in the upper-right corner of your Mail page.
Under Spam, click Spam Protection.
At the bottom of the page—“Step 1 of 3: Spam Filter”—click Continue.
At the bottom of the next page—“Step 2 of 3: Marking Messages as Spam or Not Spam”—click Continue.
On “Step 3 of 3: Image Blocking”, select “Block all images”.
The Spam button
If you get a spam message in your Inbox, check the box beside it, then click Spam. This alerts us to the latest tricks and techniques that spammers are using, and helps us clamp down tighter and fight spam more effectively.
If you change your mind or think you made a mistake, just look for the next message from that sender in your Bulk folder and click Not Spam to reverse your vote.
You should not do this with spam……………
Never open a spam message (or any message from a sender you don’t recognize) unless you have the "Block HTML graphics" setting on. If you view HTML images in an email, spammers are alerted that you opened their message. So how do you turn on the Block HTML function?
Click Options in the upper-right corner of your Mail page.
Under “Management”, click General Preferences.
Scroll down to the “Messages” section, and next to “Security:”, check the box beside “Block HTML graphics in email…”
At the bottom of the page, on the left, click Save.
Never respond to spam. To the individuals who send spam, one response or "hit" among thousands of mailings is enough to justify the practice.
Never respond to the spam email’s instructions to reply with the word "remove" unless you trust or know the sender. Many spammers use the "remove" or "unsubscribe" links as a ploy to get you to react to the email. This may alert the sender that your email address is open and available to receive mail, which greatly increases its value. If you reply, your address may be placed on more lists, resulting in more spam.
Never click on a URL or web site address listed within a spam email. This could alert the site to the validity of your email address, potentially resulting in more spam.
Never sign up with sites that promise to remove your name from spam lists. Although some of these sites may be legitimate, more often than not, they are address collectors. The legitimate sites are ignored (or exploited) by the spammers, and the address collection sites are owned by spammers. In both cases, your address is recorded and valued more highly because you have just identified that your address is active.
The only restrictions of those types are the student/education versions. Their EULA indicates explicitly it cannot be used in a commercial environment.