More Bounce Back Fun

[crashhelmet]

Jenni's post about bounce backs reminded me of this little

I had a customer last week who had over 17,000 bounceback messages in her mailbox. They were all attempts to forward SPAM type messages. What I thought was odd about it all is they were all being sent, or at least tried to be sent, to herusername@outlookexpress.com. At first I thought it was a virus or spy/malware and we were scanning everything left and right. Everything was clean.

Looked a little deeper and found that she had gone onto the web interface of the server and set it to forward her messages to herusername@outlookexpress.com. This was causing everything to be forwarded to there, including the bounce backs. That washed, rinsed, and repeated until I caught it at 17,341 messages.

She says that she was told that is how you get your email to show up in Outlook Express.

CH

[Apallo]

I feel your pain. We get those all the time because someone out there is somehow using our domain info to send spam. It's not coming from our internal servers, and since this has started happening, the server guys have been monitoring our exchange carefully, and there's no extra traffic. I think someone is using our email addreesses (as they are way easy to guess: firstname@domain.com) and forging them into the to from field of their spam. We've been getting around 900 bounce backs per person per day.

[technical.angel]

Well, Apallo, I could just send those phishers who hit us over. That'll give you something to do.

[SilverOrb]

I have to ask, what exactly was she doing wrong? (No, I'm not saying she wasn't wrong, I just don't understand the technical stuff in this)

[Broomjockey]

Outlook express is an email program, not a domain name. Everything after the "@" symbol in an email address tells the system what server to send the email to. "@aol.com" sends to AOL's servers, "@msn.com" to Microsoft's, etc. etc. Since there isn't a server called "outlookexpress" the program tries to send the email, but fails. That creates the bounce back "failed to deliver" notice.

The correct way to have your messages show up in the program is just to tell it what server to fetch the messages from by putting in your proper email address and the password, where it automatically logs on and downloads the messages.

Sorry if it seems a little basic or something, but I wasn't sure where you were getting lost.

[SilverOrb]

It was the part about what everything after the @ symbol actually does. Thanks for the clarification.... Makes sense now.

[Broomjockey]

Ah, okay then. Well, glad I could help!