Email Spoofing - I Hate It!!!

My domain name has been spoofed for email and it's driving me crazy! I get tons of bounces every day to email addresses like tuvabc@wholebrain..., email addresses that don't really exist - just random letters at my domain.

Someone in cyber world has hijacked my domain for the purpose of spamming and it really pisses me off! People all over the world are getting spam with my domain on it - my company name! I can tell by the addresses the bounces come from. I imagine millions of emails with my domain as the return address going out everyday with this crap. I feel violated! How dare someone do this to me -- or to anyone!

The worst thing about it is that there's not much I can do about it. It's so frustrating!! Especially for someone who's supposed to be tech-savvy. I can try to find out who is posing as someone from my company and sending this garbage, but then what? Ask them to stop? Yeah sure. Hire a lawyer and sue? An expensive proposition. Cross my fingers and hope my domain doesn't get blacklisted? For now, that's my only option. No matter how you look at it, the alternatives suck.

I've talked with several people about the issue, researched online, and these are the best explanations I've found. Not much help.

Spoofing: Identity Crisis

About Email Hijack, Spoofing and Phishing

Spoofed by Spammers - below article is a reprint from
Doctor Ebiz
Helping Small Business Succeed Online
Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, Editor, Wilson Internet Services
A Free Wilson Info E-zine ISSN 1529-3203
http://www.doctorebiz.com

Spoofed by the Spammers
"What can a company do when its domain name has been spoofed? In the past three days, we have received over 1,200 bounced emails that appear to have come from us.

"The e-mails are for a refinancing company. I have tried to trace the e-mails through the headers, but they are masked. I even tried submitting a phony refinance request to see if I can get them to call me.

"How can I get this to stop? How can I report these people? And how can I avoid our domain getting blacklisted as a spammer for something someone did to us? If this can happen to a little company like ours, it is happening to others as well." -- Angie Keating, Reclamere, Inc.

You're not alone; this has happened to me, also. To research your question, I consulted with Laura Atkins of Word to the Wise, LLC, an expert on e-mail abuse and deliverability issues. She said that most public blacklists don't list the spammer's domain name but his IP address instead, that spammers sometimes use open proxies overseas that hide their true IP address

It's possible that your domain might be listed in some blacklist somewhere, but if no one is actually bouncing your mail as a result, you don't need worry too much about it. When your mail is being blocked, however, you must take action.

Unfortunately, there's not much recourse for people with this problem. To nab the spammers doing this to you, you must "follow the money," determine who is benefiting monetarily from the spam. Then get yourself an Internet-savvy lawyer and take the spammer to court.

In California and some other states, there is a specific law that makes it illegal to spoof the return address, making it easier to go after such spammers. Otherwise your court case would have to be based on case law rather than existing statutes, an even more expensive proposition.

I encourage you to lobby your legislators for effective federal laws against spamming that (1) aren't watered down so much by the direct marketing industry that they don't do any good, but at the same time (2) are not so restrictive that they make it impossible to conduct legitimate, opt-in e-mail marketing.