Email Help

[bw3249]

I am being flooded with unable to deliver notices because some spammer has been using my domain as the return address on their spam. Unfortunately, each spam uses a different mailbox which makes filtering a challenge. I have an idea for a really simple filter that would kill most of this junk, but can't figure out how to program it. I've been reading the documentation on custom filters, but it not making any sense to me. I was hoping someone far wiser than I could give me a hand.

I make great use of my catch-all alias. Whenever I give out an email address, the mailbox is always who I'm giving the address to. For example, if giving my address to FutureQuest, the mailbox would be bww-futurequest@..., to Yahoo, it would be bww-yahoo@... This lets me track who is selling my email address.

Because I prefix each mailbox with "bww-" it would be very easy to filter out fake addresses generated by spammers. Anything without the prefix could be shipped out to that big black hole in the net. But I've not been able to figure out how to write a custom filter to accomplish it.

Are there any email experts out there that could give me a hand?

[frankc]

Brian, I've had the exact same problem with one of my 24 domains. The catch-all was catching (most) all the spam.

I now forward the catch-all to my gmail address which does a very nice job of filtering spam and then POP into it to grab the remainders. Works nicely!

[Joseph]

I now forward the catch-all to my gmail address which does a very nice job of filtering spam and then POP into it to grab the remainders. Works nicely!
:shocked:

This type of setup is extremely dangerous. If the entity which you decide to forward your spam to actually reports the spam to any blacklists, or has it's own blacklist, you can very easily get your FutureQuest Account blocked by them, or if they're really strict, the whole Server or more could be blocked. :wah:

We're currently not aware of GMail having any such blacklist setup, however it's very well known that AOL does (and many of our clients have gotten notices related to this). A rather large and detailed discussion regarding AOL's methods can be found here (http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?t=18645) and here (http://www.aota.net/forums/showthread.php?t=18709). I also believe that Yahoo & Hotmail have setups similar to AOL (but I'm not positive). It's also very possible GMail could implement a similar setup as well.

Basically, since the email was sent to your FutureQuest Account, before being sent to the spam filtering entity, the spam filter sees it as being received "from" your FutureQuest Account, thus your FutureQuest Account is reported as the actual/original spammer.

So, please, for the safest setup simply use the available SpamAssasin Filters to either delete or tag the messages, or think VERY carefully before forwarding email off to be filtered by a third party email provider.

[frankc]

Good thinking Joseph, but I knew that gmail did no such thing and I never report inbound emails as spam. If they change the modus operandi at gmail, we'll take another tack.