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Someone’s Hijacked my email address
Posted by Phill Fenton on 11 December 2005 at 18:31How do I know?
I am getting loads of returned mail – mail whiich is being returned by spam filters. Non of this has been sent by myself, the email being returned is addressed to randomcharacters@therightsigns.co.uk (e.g – cskzg@therightsigns.co.uk).
I use AOL for accessing the internet and for email. For domain hosting I use Easyspace and as part of my domain hosting service I get anyname@therightsigns.co.uk re-directed to my AOL email address.
I don’t believe this is a virus problem as I can’t actually send out any email with my domain name as my email address.
I am writing to easyspace to see if I can get this resolved. Meanwhile, does anyone have any suggestions for what I should do?
Chris Dowd replied 19 years, 9 months ago 10 Members · 23 Replies -
23 Replies
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Phil,
Don’t forget that this is also an old spammer trick.
as you don’t send e-mal to yourself use your spam blocker to block emails sent by you to yourself.Justmy 2cents worth
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I’ll bet it is a virus.
Since Thanksgiving, I have been getting some very official-looking emails that luckily my anti-virus catches.
Have you ever tried AVG by Grisoft?
It’s a free downloadable anti-virus program and it is really very good.
Love…..Jill
http://free.grisoft.com/doc/1 -
Have a read of this (found it on google)
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I use AVG too Phill, and it is very good.
But, I also get these same things on all my addresses,
I am administrator for a few web sites, and I get them from them too, and I don’t send out much mail via these at all.
Two reasons why this happens.
1) somone who has your address in their address book has been caught with a virus, and they harvest your address via that,
and 2) some sites that you visit are not as secure as others, and spammers harvest them from there too.
I get 60 emails a day that are of this nature. Damned frustrating I know.
I am with Bigpond here in OZ, and they have spam blockers before it even gets to my mail box, so I can only imagine how many are being caught before I get them.
I also use two other ISP’s and the smallest one, a little bloke outside melbourne, gets so many thru his servers it shuts him down every ffew days. So much so, I have had to move to another ISP with bigger better servers and anti spam systems.
Not sure what you can do about this mate, but it is a worldwide thing, nothing against you personally
Some of our IT guys on here may have some better answers (?)
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Phil – It’s most likely someone who has your address in their email adress book who has got the virus and is sending email out with your name in the ‘From’ box.
Its a pain in the butt but nothing to worry about.
As a second check for a virus the online check at http://www.pandasoftware.com is well worth a try – it’ll check for spyware too.
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oh no Phill, I had to help out someone with the same issue and contacted the ISPs, when studying it it turns out that they are just spreading random email but using your email address as the reply address. Emails about Viagra and other enhancing drugs?
I suspect the mods will edit this thread so I am going to use another email address for example…
Drugs company in america, sends out random email to multiple addresses, but they put in the Reply Address as junk or Phill@BBC.co.uk , these emails then fail to reach there destination and get ‘automatically’ bounced back to the sender which is now you. You then get loads of email from all the commerical spam filters blocking and returning your mail. (Big failure on the internet)
I helped someone who had “sales@bbc.co.uk”, we had to loose the address as it is impossible to police. In the end we setup “info@bbc.co.uk” and this was a Pop3 account, all other mail was forwarded to a Spam folder on the website. In our case it was NoSpam@Easily.co.uk so all junk was destroyed.
The biggest costs is the advertising literature, everything was printed with that email address and then comes customer address books. So we do use an ISP spam filter which helps a lot but if Dave@bbc.co.uk gets spammed then we will have a big problem with my account.
So, to say again… the BBC.CO.UK address is commanded to get alll mail to forward to a useless fake email address and then only allow Dave@bbc.co.uk and info@bbc.co.uk to go through, if that makes sense.
You said you was with Easyspace, perhaps you have a control panel login, perhaps you should change your mail settings.
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Thats a bit technical for a simple mind like me Dave, I dont suffer from this sort of problem, but I am sure Phil has it sorted by now. thanks for you contribution anyway, I’m sure it will help others.
Peter
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ok peter, iget carried away, its just not all spam can be stopped … also i forgot to say, any program that returns a Spam message to the sender is actually asking for trouble, this is how I think my friend ended up with the problem in the first case, i think the returned message was then put on a ‘suckers’ list and then the ‘returned messages’ happened.
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Dave,
I’ve always advised people against bouncing mail, I just delete all unwanted from the server b4 download, I know if you bounce stuff, you may be subscribing to more junk, is this true? I believe it is, but dont know how to explain it, over to you,Peter
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bang on… another thing is to be careful who you give your email address to over the phone/web sites. Never give a personal email address like dave@bbc.co.uk I always give out sales@bbc.co.uk. Another thing is having a website ‘without’ an email address on it, a Contact form protects you.
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so Dave lee travis is now getting loads of spam 😀
there will be a dave @ bbc.co.uk.Hope he dosnt mind you giving out his addy (!)
Peter
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We had (and still have) the same problem that you refer to Dave, however, we just put inboxer (www.inboxer.co.uk) on all our systems, works an absolute treat, and no need to re-print or change email addresses, we probably get 2 – 300 spam emails a day on this one account, and only the genuine ones get through!
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Chris,
where about in your system are you putting this…….
Many Thanks
Andrew
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Hi Andrew
Not sure where it goes on the system, however, works with outlook and outlook express ok. Have a look at their website and click on the “Tour” button, tells you a lot more.
Chris.
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Sorry, just noticed, inboxer does not support Outlook Express, only Outlook.
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couldn’t see mac compatability………. 1200 cr@p mails this Thursday….. 😕
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actually Outlook 2003 has a kind of spam filter in it… but inboxer looks pretty interesting… i think Phill is on 56Kb (for some reason, i could be wrong), I suspect this will still have to download all those messages and mark them as junk. This is what MailWasher did i think.
Also, we was receving email every 3 seconds, so it was out of control. A lot of downloading will increase your Cap rate (if your on one), so 1GB of spam.. hmm. But I dont see any reason why that software shouldn’t be trialed.
Also if you have Outlook on your PC (comes with Office) then transfer your email settings from Outlook Express to Outlook. Very decent program that.
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Might give inboxer ago myself.
Getting 300 emails a day with each address I have (I have 8 🙁 …) Today, only 2 emails were real, and I nearly erased them because they were new people I didn’t know.
Spam is just madness. With all this technology, I don’t understand how they can not fix this easier. Probably comes down to profitability I suppose. No one would want to pay for it.
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The good thing with inboxer is the 21 day free trial, so if you don’t like it – don’t buy it, but like I said earlier, works for us, and we’ve been using it for around 2 years now!
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