Returned mail: Service unavailable
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- Dancer
I have been getting a load of these today from servers I have never mailed. Am I being attached my martians?
Or has someone hi-jacked my account to use it as a spam distributor. If the later can someone tell me how to stop it?
- skt0
i think you might have to speak to your hosting people. but yeah, it looks like someone is spoofing your email address...
- ian0
Its the latter, don't think theres much you can do once they have the email though. Someone posted on here a few weeks ago with the same question and don't think they had any joy in clearing it up.
- showpony0
me too! they started on friday and haven't stopped. i hesitate to mark them as spam as it may throw off legit 'returned mail' messages. damn martians!
- Dancer0
Skt,
The thing is I did, a while back when I set up an out of office reply it happened again and they said:As the subject your vacation message is "Away for a small break." it sounds as if you are merely replying to all emails that come to you at your server. If Ethan has sent you an email, though perhaps you don't know him (his email could be the spam) the server will respond to this message with the Vacation message.
The most common reason for seeing 550 relaying denied errors is that the recipient email address simply does not exist and the recipient server is not accepting emails for this bad address. If you get a lot of spam and your vacation message is replying to all of this spam you will get a lot of bounced messages, as a lot of spam is from fraudulent email address that don't truly exist.
If you have any further questions regarding your (mt) Media Temple services, please feel free to contact us at any time.
- skt0
do you have your vacation message turned on at the moment?
if you don't it will be someone spoofing your email address to send spam. they aren't actually using your address, just making it look like that is where it is coming from.
- jpea0
It's most likely back-scatter spam. A spammer sends out a assload of emails with your address as the reply-to address, then if it bounces it goes back to you. Basically it's a shitty thing for spammers to do, but it also means that the recipients server isn't setup correctly either since it doesn't check to see if the IP address in the header of the spam email actually corresponds to the reply-to address domain. If it didn't check out, they shouldn't send anything back... so yeah, not much you can do except setup a filter in your inbox or on your hosting setup blocking all of these for a while.
- 23kon0
i got the same thing happening to me the other month.
got in touch with hosts and they said its cos the spammers send it out with that fake return address. however, the worldwide spam brain knows that it isnt YOU thats sent this out so YOU wont get branded a spammer.or what skt said
i just liked the thought of a giant brain
- Dancer0
Sorry:
I just sent him another mail...
- ribit0
the worst is when a bunch of people set their auto-reply to respond to mailing lists, and you get this endless loop of auto-repsonse mails getting sent to everyone on the list, with extra mails from people saying 'please stop it!!!!' (which again triggers a response email...)... quite funny, sort of.
- Like one of those 'endless images'... disappearing into infinity.ian
