Like many people, alas, I receive a lot of spam (20-25 daily), and I deal with it through MailwasherPro. Lately I've noticed that several spam mails have my own e-mail address and name as the origin. Which means that by blacklisting them I would black list myself. I don't understand much about their latest procedures, but the question is: Should I worry about it (and change my e-mail address) or just ignore it and let it be. Can anyone advise please if it is a matter of concern?
I have had similar problems, I just left them nothing bad happened to me. I eventually switched and now use a gmail account, any messages that I dont want to see I mark them as spam and they never show themselves in my inbox again.
Had the same problems but eventually they stop or become very infrequent I never changed my address. (as Blackspears quote) Illegitimis non carborundum I also used get one that had no sender no recipient no subject and the mail was blank !!!! I also use Mailwasher but it is only limited for bouncing as most spam has a bogus address.
Thanks for the replies, looks like it isn't something to worry about. Spam is the only real mass malware that is conspicuous and still unchallenged. If it is allowed to grow, I see a real threat not only to the e-mail system, but the internet as a whole.
Spammers have always forged the sender address and have been using other people's email addresses for some years now. The main problem is that you will get hit with misdirected bounces (error messages from mail servers sent to your address) which are not easy to filter without affecting genuine error messages. The best advice in my view is to report all spam, including misdirected bounces to SpamCop. In the case of bounces add the From: address of the bounce (requires a full SpamCop account) - if it shows "Mailer Daemon" substitute postmaster@ the domain instead, and add the following explanation: "Spam (with forged sender address) bounced to third party (see http://spamlinks.net/prevent-secure-backscatter-fake.htm http://www.spamcop.net/fom-serve/cache/329.html#bounces and http://www.spamhaus.org/faq/answers.lasso?section=ISP Spam Issues#109 ) - actual source was..." Only include the last part (actual source) if you can identify it from the email headers, see Reading Email Headers for an explanation on how to do this. Also note that almost all spam has a fake header (the last one). See CastleCops: So, how are we going to deal with these joe-jobs? for another discussion of this issue.
Also if you use Gmail consider running this python script http://www.submanifold.be/triade/misc/gknujon/gknujon.html which will report to Knujon (and optionally Spamcop too). I'm too lazy to do the web stage of reporting with Spamcop so only report to Knujon. The Knujon plugin for Thunderbird is very good. http://www.knujon.com/news.html Phasechange
