[2 Days Later: It all seems to have settled down remarkably quickly. All email activities are back to normal again. Thanks for all the advice and suggested swearing!]
The important bit: If you’re sending me an email please don’t use pete@ this domain. Use my gmail.com account which, like most of my online accounts, is peteashton.
It had to happen eventually. This domain, my domain, the domain that carries my own personal given name, has been randomly picked by an email spam cunt as their “from:” address. (I think there’s a specific term for this but it escapes me right now.) This means a couple of things.
Firstly a load of spam is out there that looks like it came from me. This is obviously not very good. A real world example would be someone who looks a bit like me (balding, skinny, white, glasses – it’s not hard really) wandering around Birmingham telling random strangers their name is Pete Ashton, slapping them around the face and running off, which wouldn’t do much for my reputation around Birmingham. I’m hoping that email filters are savvy enough to know that spammers routinely forge the headers on their emails with innocent domains but there’s a chance, how large a chance I don’t know, that some email from me may be blocked. I’d be very interested to know whether this is the case.
Secondly, and more pertinently, I’m getting flooded with returned spam (thanks to spammers not being that attentive to the accuracy of their email lists). In between checking my email at 9am and 5pm about 1400 of the things appeared in my Inbox with another 600 or so being filtered as spam and going in my Junk folder. This has actually happened to another domain I own but in that case they were all address to info@, an address I wasn’t using, so I was able to set up a simple rule to delete them on sight. This time they’re using all manner of nonsense names all @peteashton.com so filtering is not so simple. In the short term I managed to weed them out by searching for “failure notice”, “delivery status notification”, “Postmaster”, “Mail Delivery” and so on but in the long term this won’t be effective, not just because there are so many different systems for returning email but because of the danger of deleting false positives.
Another solution might be to filter out anything not sent to pete@, but that would include emails where I’m in the BCC field such as mailing lists from bands and the like. So that’s probably not a go-er. I’m going to try some filtering techniques but would really welcome advice on this. Is there something in the headers I can use?
In the meanwhile I won’t be checking my peteashton.com mail regularly until I figure out a solution. Probably once a day when I’ve got a bit of time to filter out the good apples. So please use the gmail.com email which has peteashton at the front of it for the time being.
(Ironically I don’t really get that much email these days – maybe two or three useful or relevant mails a day – but I still need it…)
(Oh, and if you can’t help with the tech stuff, suggestions of curse words and phrases that might be strong enough will also be very welcome.)
Those windowlickers will never have sperm the strength of envelope adhesive. I hope they get chips planted in their heads causing them pain for every moment theey’re not clearly helping people.
Sent you an email yesterday regarding NZ. Did you get it? We need your help again! Love, L
It’s called a joejob, and there’s stuff all you can do about it really. It’s happened to me at least three times, and is going on from MiB at the moment too. Since I get around 500 spam emails a day, I hardly notice these days.
The first time it happened, I had a bit of a panic. Now, I just wait, which is pretty much all you can do. Chances are, it’ll subside in a day or two. To cope with your overflowing in box you could just discard everything until it stops, but that’s a little drastic. Alternatively, discard everything that isn’t addressed to pete@. For me, since nearly all bounce messages include the original email, I find my existing spam filters handle nearly all of it for me anyway.
Wait, it’s all you can do. And if you ever met someone who tell you their job is in internet market, you beat the living crap out of them.
wankfucking cuntydouchebags.
Aparently a Joe Job is when this is done maliciously, so I’m hoping it’s not one of them and simple the less catchy Backscatter of email spam.
Either way it’s not proving as hard to filter as I thought. Still a fucking pain though…
Does it generally subside after a day or two?
I’ve had this problem for over a year, now. I was told when I initially asked people about it that it was just something that happens and that you just have to put up with it.
Need I worry?
~ Russ L
Funnily enough, there was a question about exactly this in yesterdays Guardian : http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/askjack/2006/10/badly_returned_spams.html
Not much of a solution though.
Popefelchers.
someone who looks a bit like me (balding, skinny, white, glasses – it’s not hard really) wandering around Birmingham telling random strangers their name is Pete Ashton, slapping them around the face and running off
Hmmm, I guess I’d better stop doing that then… ;-)
This happened to me earlier this year – possibly Feb or Mar – and it is only just dying down (fingers crossed). Funnily enough, out of all the 1000s of emails I only got one person emailing me telling me to ‘stop sending them spam’ but resulted in my puttign a note on my website about spam not coming from me (as people will often check the domain name). The trouble is, it put my address onto more spam lists, and now I get phishing galore from “Barclays” and someone out there really thinks I need Viagra (possibly connected with the Barclays, as Kenneth Williams might say…). I was being so careful with my address too!
Another upsurge in spam occurred when someone put me on their email-christmas-card-list, and decided they wanted everyone to know how many friends they had in their address book, including all the ‘famous people’, and so sent it CC instead of the more honourable BCC. Moan over and out.