Are you seeing these mailer bounces?

These are annoying me so much. The problem of "backscatter" as it's called 
has been around for years, but it really seems to be picking up in volume. 
One of the reasons is that there are 'holes' or vulnerabilities in major 
mail servers, so they can be easily convinced to send such backscatter out.

What happens is, one of my domains gets used by a spammer as a return 
address for mass mailings. This can easily happen to you too since some 
virus/spam software chooses random addresses address books or otherwise 
harvested from PCs as the forged sender.

Depending on how the spam headers are crafted, it is generally very easy to 
get a mail server (even at very large ISPs) to accept the mail, figure out 
they can't deliver it, and then generate a NEW email which they send back 
to me at the forged address (I'm the victim).

Since the spam body contents are often stripped out, it is often difficult 
for spamprobe to separate these backscatter DSNs from legitimate DSNs.

System administrators can and should fix their mailer systems against this 
problem. Many of them just don't understand what's going on and how their 
sites are generating new spam. Our site automatically blacklists hosts 
which spam us, which now includes a number of ISPs who bombard us with 
unsolicited backscatter. Whenever I talk to such ISPs, they insist that the 
spam originated somewhere else. They are right, but their mailer software 
generated new emails and sent them to me - and I had nothing to do with the 
original mailing.

This is a very irritating topic, because it's a combination of poorly 
designed software on the server side as well as a question of semantics. 
Are unsolicited bulk server-generated backscatter in fact "spam"? spamprobe 
has trouble figuring it out, and I don't blame it. I have trouble figuring 
it out too, but ultimately it is unsolicited bulk email and UBE = spam.



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