Let's get acquainted

[fatfires]

am i the only one????????

since posting on this thread my domain has been inundated with return mail as some ******** has sent a load of spam using my mail address as the return, so far up to this morning over 3000 mails making my emails unworkable, yes I do have a 'catchall' a/c and that will be changed tomorrow but just as a warning to all, if you have a catchall on your domain, change it I am learning the hard way - mails are coming in faster than I can delete them
I may have to do a block delete so deleting genuine mails as well.
This does seem like one hell of a coincidence! I just hope I can salvage my domain and my business use from all this mess

[dieselboy]

since posting on this thread my domain has been inundated with return mail as some ******** has sent a load of spam using my mail address as the return, so far up to this morning over 3000 mails making my emails unworkable, yes I do have a 'catchall' a/c and that will be changed tomorrow but just as a warning to all, if you have a catchall on your domain, change it I am learning the hard way - mails are coming in faster than I can delete them
I may have to do a block delete so deleting genuine mails as well.
This does seem like one hell of a coincidence! I just hope I can salvage my domain and my business use from all this mess

whats a catchall? hope you get it sorted!

[MattF]

whats a catchall? hope you get it sorted!

Every e-mail gets dumped in it.

Unless one is in charge of ones own mailserver Tony, you're pretty screwed for rejecting alot of the cr@p. Sender address spoofing happens large scale on a daily basis. Soon as you send an e-mail from an account, it's pretty much just a matter of time before it does the rounds.

[POPEYE]

since posting on this thread my domain has been inundated with return mail as some ******** has sent a load of spam using my mail address as the return, so far up to this morning over 3000 mails making my emails unworkable, yes I do have a 'catchall' a/c and that will be changed tomorrow but just as a warning to all, if you have a catchall on your domain, change it I am learning the hard way - mails are coming in faster than I can delete them
I may have to do a block delete so deleting genuine mails as well.
This does seem like one hell of a coincidence! I just hope I can salvage my domain and my business use from all this mess

I've had an extra large ammout of cr@p as well since posting on this thread,

[MattF]

I've had an extra large ammout of cr@p as well since posting on this thread,

It's probably just coincidence yourself and Tony are suffering, Ian. E-mail addresses aren't included in the posts, so can't be parsed as such. Someone would have to be doing it manually from the profiles if it was gained from the forum.

[pops]

It's probably just coincidence yourself and Tony are suffering, Ian. E-mail addresses aren't included in the posts, so can't be parsed as such. Someone would have to be doing it manually from the profiles if it was gained from the forum.

Trev Matts doing it now too

[fatfires]

whats a catchall? hope you get it sorted!

I'm sure somebody will correct me as I'm no technophobe as I understand it, if you own the domain name - the bit after the @, anything that goes before @ in a mail adddress gets delivered to your mailbox (your domain name) if you are set up for a catchall a/c, I was told it was usefull incase anyone made an error in the prefix of your mail address. tomorrow I find out just how many addresses I can have before the '@' and refuse all others and if people missspell my mail address tough!
as I am terrible at spelling(yes Matt honest!) it goes against the grain a bit but after having to go through sooooo many mails the last 2 days so that my junk filter sorts them, I don't need the hastle again and as my domain does 'what it says on the tin' I don't want to stop using it.
any of you experts got any other resolutions to offer?

[MattF]

I'm sure somebody will correct me as I'm no technophobe as I understand it, if you own the domain name - the bit after the @, anything that goes before @ in a mail adddress gets delivered to your mailbox (your domain name) if you are set up for a catchall a/c, I was told it was usefull incase anyone made an error in the prefix of your mail address. tomorrow I find out just how many addresses I can have before the '@' and refuse all others and if people missspell my mail address tough!
as I am terrible at spelling(yes Matt honest!) it goes against the grain a bit but after having to go through sooooo many mails the last 2 days so that my junk filter sorts them, I don't need the hastle again and as my domain does 'what it says on the tin' I don't want to stop using it.
any of you experts got any other resolutions to offer?

That's correct. A domain catchall accepts anything to the @example.com domain address. Catchall's are actually a bad idea Tony, as you've already discovered. By far the better way to do it is to reject invalid recipient addresses, as that way the sending smtp server will generate a non delivery notification, informing the sender why their e-mail was rejected. If you have control of the smtp server, you can include a generic contact address to be returned to them in the smtp response. A catchall, on the other hand, swamps you with invalid e-mails, and as you've noted when you get an attack like this, you're more liable to lose valid e-mail just due to the sheer bulk of what e-mail you have to troll through whilst checking for valid mail.

[MattF]

Trev Matts doing it now too

What? Parsed is a completely valid word.

Edit: Just thought. You didn't think that was supposed to say:

Can't be arsed as such

did you?

[That Ruddy Squirrel]

Trev Matts doing it now too

Oh no he isn't Pops, Data Parsing = Data Extracting, it's a technical term

[MattF]

Oh no he isn't Pops, Data Parsing = Data Extracting, it's a technical term

Cheers Trev.

[pops]

Cheers Trev.

Ok this time see ginger old people learn all the time too

[fatfires]

Oh no he isn't Pops, Data Parsing = Data Extracting, it's a testical term

Well I understood what he meant....it was a mutts nutts of an explanation

[MattF]

Well I understood what he meant....it was a mutts nutts of an explanation

Is that a subtle way of sayng it was a right load of old balls? It's a convoluted thing to explain, but a MTA reference may give you a better insight of what I mean. If you look at the documentation on spoofing, recipient validation and backscatter, that will give you a more indepth idea of the types of problem you are trying to cure, and what to prevent yourself from causing in the process.

http://www.postfix.org/documentation.html

Have fun.

[fatfires]

Is that a subtle way of sayng it was a right load of old balls? It's a convoluted thing to explain, but a MTA reference may give you a better insight of what I mean. If you look at the documentation on spoofing, recipient validation and backscatter, that will give you a more indepth idea of the types of problem you are trying to cure, and what to prevent yourself from causing in the process.

http://www.postfix.org/documentation.html

Have fun.

Matt
I can't believe you missed my subtle editing from technical to testical ....or did you just ignore it, anyway just to finalise my problems (I hope!) I have got rid of my catchall and put in alias's now - what a difference! especially as my junk filter is learning. My mails are down to workable levels now and have to say the guys where I am hosted eventually with a little persuasion moved me to a server with more bitts and bobbs for free!
thanks for your advice/help guys