Hijacked email account

[pammy]

HI peep's. A friend of mine finds herself in a pretty awful spot and I wonder if anyone here can help. This is her story:

It seems that my email address has been hijacked & is being used to send out thousands of spam emails.
I'm getting masses of returned mails & warnings from various places.
it is "anyname"@hername.fsnet.co.uk thousands of mails & thousands of different names, being used.
I'm worried that my emails will end up being blocked, as suspected spam.
I contacted wanadoo, last time it happened, but they told me there is nothing I can do! Is this right???

thoughts anyone please?

 

[Shude]

thoughts anyone please?

The address has not been "hi-jacked", it is simply being spoofed. You can send e-mail addressed as anyone you like, you will never receive a reply to a spoofed address.

I used to get thousands of delivery failures and spam notices for e-mails supposedly sent by me, the addresses weren't even ones that I use for sending mail, only for receiving. Now't you can do about it I'm afraid.

 

[pammy]

The address has not been "hi-jacked", it is simply being spoofed. You can send e-mail addressed as anyone you like, you will never receive a reply to a spoofed address.

But she says she is recieving replies to these messages?

 

[Shude]

But she says she is recieving replies to these messages?

Yes, what I meant was I could spoof her address from here and I'd never see the replies - she'd get them all!

 

[pammy]

Yes, what I meant was I could spoof her address from here and I'd never see the replies - she'd get them all!

aah - IC - with you

Thanks Nick

 

[Sp!ke]

This is a common problem. I suffered with it myself with my domain using my own mail server last year and was getting hundreds of thousands of bounced reply mails daily.

I am surprised FSNet does not have controls to stop this abuse. FSNet should be registered with http://spf.pobox.com/, which drastically reduce this problem or knock it on the head altogether.

Contact FSNet and ask what can be done - She may already have the control to bounce these messages at source in her control panel.

 

[Shude]

Contact FSNet and ask what can be done - She may already have the control to bounce these messages at source in her control panel.

The second my ISP switched on Brightmail the problem went away!

 

[grasmere]

Pammy, further to what shude said, check your own email account settings on your pc and you can see that you can set your own 'reply to' email address to anything you want to.

This is the gist anyway. The emails that are sent out typically dont need a reply, they just need a valid email address so it can be sent in the first place.
The idea of the emails are typically to get someone to click on a link in the subject of the email.

Not sure what can be done at all - whats brightmail shude?

 

[Shude]

Not sure what can be done at all - whats brightmail shude?

It's a corporate/ISP level spam solution. I went to bed one night receiving about 100 spam messages per day, woke up the next day receiving about 2 per month

On the ISP control panel website I can turn it off if I want, but I ain't gonna!

 

[BTB 500]

We have SpamShark at work, which I guess is similar. I use Yahoo for personal email, and the spam/bulk mail filtering on that is pretty good. Very rarely do any reach my inbox.

 

[glojo]

Hi Pammy,
If you search back on this section I asked exactly the same question. Found it..... Snap

By sheer coincidence I WAS also with Freeserve (fsnet) I wrote numerous e-mails to Freeserve pleading with them to do ANYTHING to stop the problem, but all I got back were useless replies stating that someone might 'accidentally' have typed in my e-mail addresss. At the height of the problem I was getting in excess of 500 returned e-mails per day!!!!

Your friend can log onto the members page at Wanadoo (The owners of fsnet) and reoprt each e-mail (en-bloc) as spam. This is then supposed to be actioned by Wanadoo technical support!!

I found that the e-mails peaked and gradually eased off to a controllable number, but eventually I shopped around and got a much, much better deal from an Internet provider who is quite literally at the end of a telephone call!

Sorry to be a defeatist, but Wanadoo were simply not interested.

Regards,
John

 

[saorbust]

Pammy,

As a further thought - does she have uptodate anti virus protection ? We had an episode of this at work, and its related to a virus - released about 2 months ago. I can't recall the name of the virus, but I'd strongly suggest she update her signature files, scan the entire computer and also install a firewall (zone alarm is free, and very good - others are about).

Clarky.

 

[PJH]

Tell your friend to open another e-mail account for herself, perhaps with a middle initial in it, and then distribute the new mail ID to all that need it.
Then remove the old account ID from Outlook (outlook express).
All the junk mail will build up on the mail server and not bother her.