Spam FAQ Part 2

In Part 2 I'll give an overview of what must be the most annoying situation regarding spam, and one which you can do nothing about!

The situation is that you open your email up one morning and have to download thousands of what we call 'bounced' email messages. These are emails that have been sent by a server that has received an email that it doesn't know what to do with. This is mainly caused by an unknown address.

What's happened here is that the spammer has used your domain as the email and added a random name to the front. For example sdfertuhty@planstoprosper.org.uk. What the spammer aims for is to get their url link in the email into someone's inbox. They need an address to send it from so they harvest actual domains and just add random names to the front. In most cases they can send it from any server so they hijack a machine or a server and send out thousands if not millions of emails using random domains. So one day it's the turn of your domain to get chosen. So they send out these emails which would seem to be sent by you, but they're not. They have to have somewhere to send them so they again harvest domains and make up the name part. Hence a lot get rejected and bounced. And unfortunately they get bounced back to you.

And the annoying part is that there's absolutely nothing you can do to stop it happening.

You can minimise the annoyance however by deleting all emails that get bounced to random@youremaildomain.com before you need to download them. The spamming still goes on but you just don't see it.

Keep visiting www.planstoprosper.org.uk for Spam FAQ Part 3!

Spam FAQ Part 1

This is the first in a series of articles looking at how spam blights the online lives of so many people. I'll be visiting how spammers operate and what you can do to minimise the grief that spam causes you.

So you think you are suffering because of spam? Well, you probably are. Spammers cause grief in many different ways, not just by filling up your inbox. Here are some scenarios.

• You constantly receive spam in your inbox.
• You get bounced emails from people telling you that the email address you have apparently sent to doesn’t exist.
• You get emails from servers telling you that the message you apparently sent has been flagged as spam.
• You find you can’t send emails to certain addresses because somewhere your email address has been labelled as ‘spam’.
• Your web host sends you a snotty email asking you to cut back on the number of emails you’re sending.
• Unbeknown to you your pc has some processes running which are sending spam emails.
• You don’t receive some emails because your system labels them as spam.
• Your website on shared hosting is slow because the server is sending spam emails.
• You and even your children may be receiving inappropriate emails.

Let’s have a simple look at email. Basically an email is an electronic message sent from one server to another. Usually the message itself is created by your email client and passed to your server or created on the server by your own software such as mailing list managers. Easy in theory but in practice it can be a little more complicated so that we have a system that’s flexible enough to meet our needs.

So in the above case the process is

your pc -> server1 -> server2 -> recipient pc

Each email that’s sent contains ‘headers’ which is a block of code that outlines the trail that the email has taken to get from the sender to the recipient, and this lists all the servers it has used in the journey, together with some other information.

Keep checking back for Spam FAQ Part 2 soon! Or why not subscribe to the site feed at the top of the page?