How can I block this certain type of spam?

[Erin Pavlina]

This one has me stumped.

I am getting a series of spam messages daily that have the following component to them.

From: they're using my own email address (how are they doing that?)
To: they're using the same email address, mine.
Subject: Your order

If I block the sender, I'll be blocking my own email address which I need for test purposes sometimes.

If I block the To field I'll never get an email at my email address again.

If I block the subject I may not get legitimate emails that have that as a subject line.

The actual spam email is just an image so how do I block that?

Am I doomed to continue getting this spam forever?

[Dan.Linehan]

What mail client is this on?

[Erin Pavlina]

outlook express.

[Dan.Linehan]

The consensus online seems to be to just delete these messages manually. Your address is spoofed on there -- but you are right, blocking it wouldn't do any good, because you don't want to block your own address anyway.

The real solution here requires tracing things back a bit further. Your web host is letting you get spammed by not blocking it at the server.

You may want to reconsider where your domain is hosted for this reason. For example, Dreamhost lets you run gmail on any of your domains at no additional cost via google apps. You just log into the Dreamhost control panel and select the option to let Google manage your mail. You can still use Outlook Express, but G-mail is practically spam free because it filters everything out right as it hits the servers.

I personally haven't seen a piece of spam in years using this method.

[dwixi]

Originally Posted by Erin Pavlina

This one has me stumped.

I am getting a series of spam messages daily that have the following component to them.

From: they're using my own email address (how are they doing that?)
To: they're using the same email address, mine.
Subject: Your order

If I block the sender, I'll be blocking my own email address which I need for test purposes sometimes.

If I block the To field I'll never get an email at my email address again.

If I block the subject I may not get legitimate emails that have that as a subject line.

The actual spam email is just an image so how do I block that?

Am I doomed to continue getting this spam forever?

If they can do that then nothing you do with that email adress is safe...
paypal, cedit cards EVEYRTHING. If you cant find a solution you should delete this account.

[carenkh]

Originally Posted by dwixi

If they can do that then nothing you do with that email adress is safe...
paypal, cedit cards EVEYRTHING. If you cant find a solution you should delete this account.

This isn't true. Being able to spoof your e-mail address doesn't mean they have access to your secure accounts. My main e-mail address was spoofed & sent out tons of spam about two years ago... I never changed the e-mail address, but I've never had another problem with it. This was the same e-mail I used to log in to paypal and lots of other accounts.

[Dan.Linehan]

Originally Posted by dwixi

If they can do that then nothing you do with that email adress is safe...
paypal, cedit cards EVEYRTHING. If you cant find a solution you should delete this account.

What makes you say this exactly? E-mail spoofing has been going on for decades..

[Minsc]

Assuming you recieve email at an @erinpavlina.com email address, you could add SPF protection to that domain to only allow emails sent from your outbound mail server.

A mail reciever can look up the SPF field on your domain and find that an email claims to be from you but really isn't, and it can either drop the email or add it to a spam folder. That should help with your problem and will prevent people from sending emails to other people pretending to be you.

SPF is implemented as a TXT record on your domain's DNS, usually at the root of the domain, but if you send email with an address at a subdomain I think you would put the record on that subdomain.

The record looks like "v=spf1 [mail-server-specific settings] -all". You'll need to ask your SMTP host to find which domains/ip addresses are allowed to send mail.

If you mess up the record you'll have trouble sending email until you fix it, but recieving email should work fine.

Here's some info about it:
SPF: Project Overview
Sender Policy Framework - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[dbstraight]

To answer how they can do that... they just lie about who the email is coming from.

Email is a very simple technology. The entire mail message (including the indicators of who it's coming from and going to and the subject and what not) is just a text file basically.

It looks something like this:

From: email1@domain1.com
To: email2@domain2.com
Subject: The subject
Message goes here

Generally, email programs don't let you play with what's going on behind the scenes, but that doesn't mean you can't do it. It's actually extremely simple for someone who knows about computer networks and the email format to "lie" about who an email is coming from. You just type in a different address in the "From" part. (In fact, most email programs will let you set it up so you can send mail from different email addresses. All this is really doing is lying about the source of the email.)

So, don't worry, Erin. This does not mean that someone has broken into your account or anything like that. There's no reason at all to delete the account.

[tstesen]

I would say just delete these manually. I get these a lot as well as a small business owner.

Typically I'll get an annoying run of these over a week or so and then they'll stop. A few months later I may see it again. For the most part I just chalk it up to part of doing business online.

[legend]

Can't you just block it?
How often do you send e-mail to yourself from your own e-mail?

[Erin Pavlina]

I sometimes send email to myself to test something.

[maxrush]

Well a sure shot treatment for this would be to block yourself, maybe you can unblock yourself just for the time when u need to send yourself a mail, just to check right? wont take that much time. Infact it'd save you time from the deleting of all that mail! wont it? I guess, this is a pretty weird problem.