Mail failure notice attack

[SilverDales]

Hi, I have a m,major problem. Suddenly today when I check emails it says there are anything from 500 to 1000 emails waiting. When they dl they are all Mail system delivery failure notice emails and when I look at them they are addressed all to my addy but different before the @. What can I do about this, I have run adaware and done a system scan with Nod, don't know what else to do.

[4play]

Im assuming your running your own mail server. its probably some bot trying to randomly send you spam to accounts on your machine.

Just ignore it.

[SilverDales]

Thanks mate, seems to have sorted itself now as when I switched on this morn there were only 4. I was dreading thousands. lol

[zaphodiv]

This is what is know as a "joe job".

Internet email generally does not authenticate the From: address.

It is usually possible to send someone an email with a From: address of [email protected]

Some people have filters on their incoming email that check if the email address given as the From: address actually accepts email.
To get around that spammers send email with other peoples real email addresses as the From: address.

The internet email system was designed in the 1970's when the internet was just used by universitys and the US military. If you had a problem due to some other system you could probably get a real person on the phone who looked after that system.

Joe jobs are a paticular problem for people with their own domains and email set up to receive mail to any address at that domain.

I shifted my domains to a hosting company with advanced email fitlering using dedicated hardware from an antispam company a few months ago because this kind of thing was getting rediculous.