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Hi Ambros,
A Userhelp volunteer offers this:
What has happened is some spammer somewhere used your email address
as the reply-to address on his spam. Anyone can use any address on
email if they don't care where the replies go. The spammer does this
to defeat anti-spam measures that confirm an email address is valid
before accepting mail from it. The spammer could have gotten your
address dozens of different ways - from postings on the net, from
someplace you've given your email address, from infecting someone's
computer who has your address in their addressbook, etc. There is no
way to stop this happening and changing your email address to a new
one will not stop this from happening again.
The good news is that a spammer will only use an address for a
small run of spam email - otherwise they risk getting filtered out -
so any bounced messages you're getting will peter out pretty quick.
Spammers have literally millions of email addresses to use so you
should only see this sort of thing once in a while.
Most mail systems are smart enough to not bounce undeliverable spam
email to the reply address on the email, since it is always some
innocent third party such as yourself at the receiving end of it. Some
mail systems aren't so clever and they will bounce the undelivered
spam.
So, main point is this is not a big deal and will happen from time
to time to you and most other internet mail users, the bounces will pass,
and there is not much to be done about it by either you or us.
CCN Help
---------------------
On Fri, 16 May 2008, Ambros wrote:
> something is not as it should be. This morning I had about 120
> pieces of mail. Normally it would be less than 10. Most of the
> mail was from
>
> "Mail Delivery System" ---> Undelivered mail returned to sender
>
> Much of it came at 6:10 this morning.
> I have checked a few. The supposed recipient is not anyone I know.
>
> There were about half a dozen legit pieces of mail amid all the hunk.
> I hope I am not the only one experiencing this.
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