All of a sudden, I have a bunch of returned email in one of my inboxes. Looking thru it, it appears that some spammer has been sending email thru various open relays around the world and using random names at this domain as the email address of the sender.
At first I freaked out thinking they were coming from my server. I looked around the box and didn’t see any evidence of abuse. And I’m not in any server blacklists either. On a whim, I tried connecting to some of the sending servers specified in the emails and sure enough, I could send email out from a couple, so I don’t believe there’s anything fishy going on with my server. I’ve notified the appropriate people regarding the open relays.
Most normal people will never have heard of my site. It’s not famous or popular. So when they get an email from an address at this site, they should immediately know that it’s spam. It’s not like sending an email out from a site that a lot of people use like the dozen “service at paypal” emails I receive each week. I’m just a rinky-dink site about programming that earns a few dollars a month in advertising, not even enough to cover my costs.
But I can see the spike in traffic this is creating as people either open the spam email or look at the sender and want to know more. (question – exactly who are these people that have time to research every single spam item they receive? I think I want their job ). With traffic going up, bandwidth usage goes up, and eventually costs go up. Traffic going up because more people are reading my site is great. Traffic going up because people are ticked off at me is not so great.
I’m still perplexed as to how to get this spammer to stop using my domain name as the sender’s address.