help needed, bombarded this morning with 1400 spam emails

[JeffC]

Help please, I normally get a dozen spam emails aday which my antispam normally gets rid of. turned computer on this morn and 1250 emails came through! eveytime I click on send and recieve theres another 20 or say waiting. they are all sent to a different name @ my email addy ie andrew@ ashtfge@ .... they all have maile damon or postmaster in the title ??

Im not computer minded and could do with advice .. is there anything i can do to stop this , why am I getting these..

thanks in advance

[Zumbruk]

Someone has used your email address as a forged source address for a spam run and you're seeing the backscatter - all the bounced emails.

It will go away. Spammers rarely keep using the same name. In the meanwhile, you can stop accepting emails not addressed to a specific user - how you do this varies from email system to email system, which will drastically reduce the volume.

[ginettag27]

1250? Ouch!

I guess this is a Personal email account and POP3?

If so your ISP should have SPAM software on their side, which should allow you to be a bit more aggresive about rejecting items or tagging them as SPAM.. Some set it to low or off - which means a lot gets through that shouldn't.

I've set mine up to tag it as SPAM and then move it to a junk directory and scan through that to check who it's from and so on. Makes it more manageable, although some desired email will get put in there from time to time. You can also indicate who the email is 'to' and it should show that it's not actually being sent to you and quickly/easily remove.

HTH

[onomatopoeia]

Zumbruk said:

Someone has used your email address as a forged source address for a spam run and you're seeing the backscatter - all the bounced emails.

Sounds like it. If the OP is with Demon they can tell them to drop DSNs (addresses harvested from demon.service used to be popular with spammers once upon a time).

[JeffC]

thanks for the advice, im hopefully sorted, the guy that sorts my website has restricted what I get, it used to be "anything" @mywebsite hes restricrted it to sales@and jeff@

there is still the odd one sneaking through, but a far cry from the 2400 I got in a few hours this morning

[Zad]

One of my domains is hosted / held hostage by PlusNet. >Shudder<

Their antispam system (which had worked quite well for a few months) suddenly seems to be leaking like a Top Gear SD1. I'm now seeing hundreds of spams coming through each day, many addressed to <random set of characters>@mydomain. It's a pain but Mailwasher seems to be keeping it mostly under control.

[TheLearner]

If it's on NTL, their spam solution appears to be a button, on webmail you can click.

Doesn't appear to do anything but you can click it. So that's nice.

[JamieBeeston]

JeffC said:

thanks for the advice, im hopefully sorted, the guy that sorts my website has restricted what I get, it used to be "anything" @mywebsite hes restricrted it to sales@and jeff@

there is still the odd one sneaking through, but a far cry from the 2400 I got in a few hours this morning

That's one of the first thing we tell customers to do.. disable your catch-all accounts..

they really are a liability these days.. stops all of the fsdfsd@ emails straight away!

J

[Size Nine Elm]

I've had the same, used to have a catch-all address but you get huge amounts of junk at that - spammers see the domain and try sales@,marketing@,accounts@, etc etc so you get the lot.

At least the spam I get now is addressed to me personally And the spammer would have to use my actual email instead of a made-up one at my domain for me to get back-scatter as in the OP.