The Aardvark Speaks: I am NOT a spammer!

November 25, 2003

I am NOT a spammer!

Funny, just a few days after I started thinking that this might be happening soon, it actually did happen: I just received a spam mail that was sent by myself! Actually, it was a bounce-back from an undeliverable address, but it clearly stated me as the sender. Only I'm quite sure that none of my multiple personalities is a spammer, which means that these w*nkers used my address to send out their garbage.

Gary Turner has noticed the same thing, only he's receiving some 100 server bounce-backs per day. Niek Hockx reports the same phenomenon. Apparently someone is now using their harvested e-mail addresses not just as addressees, but also as senders of spam.

Which means that my name will soon appear on spammer blacklists and my ISP will soon threaten to shut down my account and connection. Not funny. The more these things happen, the more am I convinced that these people don't really want to sell anything: they want to shut down the Internet. With this latest trick they have taken a decisive step to make e-mail as we know it totally unuseable.

Against spam-related anger and aggression I recommend the very hot chicken curry published today over at The Aardvark Cooks.

Posted by Horst on November 25, 2003 05:39 PM to the body electric | Tell-a-friend

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Comments

The Cartoonist said on November 25, 2003 06:05 PM:

Same thing happened to me once. For three days I received gazillions of bounced mails I never sent, together with threats and insults. I just filtered the whole crap straight to my trash can.

Ingmar Greil said on November 25, 2003 07:21 PM:

Happened to me also, tons of bounces to non existant senders claiming to belong to a domain I own. Amazingly, I did not receive a single threat, nobody complaing, no postmaster or abuse departement contacting me.

Rest assured, in this day and age they know a joe job when they see one.

arved said on November 25, 2003 10:09 PM:

I usually get up to ten false "UCE complaints" a day because of header lines that look like this:
Received by: arved.de [some mail relay on a different contintent]Also very funny, Spam with faked From Adress from my domain posted to
news.admin.net-abuse.sightings and now spammers send spam to that false adress :-).

I totally agree with Horst, that this is an attempt to make Email unusable.

dieter said on November 25, 2003 10:10 PM:

From time to time I am glad about the fact that there is no complete privacy on the internet. When someone abuses of other people's identities, it is reassuring to know that net administrators can show that the from adress is faked.
I had a similar problem recently. I was careless enough to post a job offer (baby-sitter) on a public site. I did find a wonderful babysitter, but I was also inundated with spam, worms, and bounce-backs. I could hardly find the serious job offers, and after a few days, I cut off the mail-address I had posted.

dieter said on November 27, 2003 12:05 AM:

So my comment made it to the blog, after all. I do not agree with Horst and arved. I can imagine that those people test how far they can go and that they want to show off their hacking capacities but I rather doubt that they have the intention to shut down e-mail. However, they may just as well get there by accident (or rather by failing to think over the consequences of their deeds). On the whole, I think that e-mail will rather get more personal and more authentication stricken than be abandoned.

Volker Weber said on November 27, 2003 12:25 PM:

Check out the MT security hole as reported here: http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/anw-27.11.03-001/ and on the MT site.

Horst said on November 27, 2003 01:32 PM:

Thanks. I have applied the patch, and I may be removing the functionality altogether.

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