I can't believe my spam-attack today

[Black Landlord]

[quote mstudio][quote ADent]That is not a mail attack on you - that is a mail attack using your email as a return address.

Yeah, actually, I know that. I'm trying to stop the flow if possible. Are they linking my address to theirs somehow? Otherwise, what's the purpose?
Your address was either crawled and sucked from a webpage or via a worm from someone's outlook express address book.

There's no point, other than to get their spam in people's inboxes.
There's also some sort of logic the spammers use to try to get spam to appear to come from people you know so you'll be more likely to open it. So the original recipient of the spam message with your return address may have been farmed from the same source. This sort of explains why they use real addresses, or at least try to, to send these things.

[mstudio]

[quote Black Landlord]
From the mailbox pulldown select "new smart mailbox."
OK, thanks, but I don't think that will help me. They are all going to my Junk folder in Mail now, so another folder won't do much for me. I keep my mail on the server and remove it manually, so it has been piling up on the there, over 2000 as we speak.






I'm afraid to go to sleep.......

[Black Landlord]

Where is "the server"? With your ISP? Hard to offer anything helpful with incomplete information.
What exactly is the problem? Why is it a problemif there are 2,000 messages in your junk folder?
I typically have over 20k messages in my inbox.
Usually whatever open server the spammers have found gets closed in a few hours-- betcha this will die down my morning.
Who is this domain hosted with? Are any of your accounts gmail accounts? Can you repoint the e-mail alias that's getting hit towards that account instead of directly at your "main" account? What role would your provider have in dealing with your alias?

[testcase]

I've been getting various returns for email I never sent for a couple of days now. I've just been marking them as Spam. Glad to know the reason is Gmail being hacked.

[Black Landlord]

[quote testcase]I've been getting various returns for email I never sent for a couple of days now. I've just been marking them as Spam. Glad to know the reason is Gmail being hacked.
Only a small chance that gmail is the reason for this particular attack, and chances are if someone's read about it then it's already fixed. These happen all the time (usually on Sundays for whatever reason.. .)

[RAMd®d]

That always cracks me up.

Maybe it happens on Sundays more often because most SysAdmins/ITs are home asleep.

[Jimmypoo]

it will end in a day or so.

Thankfully.... there is so much stuff send that servers started validating the from IP and toss them back, instead of automatically blacklisting your domain and/or IP.

The reason... they didn't hack your email ACCOUNT - they just used the name through some other SMTP.

I have gotten a few of them over the past few years -- about the same as you did... it was maniacal, because it was my primary name/domain, and one other time, just my domain (and I had the catch-all engaged then -- when I was using GoDaddy's 1 free account until I found a host).

I created a rule (I get about 15 a day now) for all "mail deliver failed" or whatever the phrase is, that just puts them in the trash -- and FOR YOU, I'd set my "remove from server" to EVERY DAY for the next few days.