2600 spam mails in about 2 hours?

[bromide]

so today i go to check the root email, it takes a while to open and i find there are 2603 new emails all received today within a time frame of about 2 hours. they are all regarding undeliverable mail or returned mail. what is even weirder, is that they are all sent to random addresses i have never heard of before, and have not been created on my account, but they end in @mydomain.com.

what is going on?

thanks!

also, i checked the sent box and there were only the two that i have sent to someone i know.

[Andy]

Delete them. Sounds like virus generated emails, and undeliverables sent back to you from other servers.

[Frank Hagan]

Spammers will often "spoof" an email from a legitimate site. They just insert whatever they want to into the "From:" section of the header. They picked you at random, and sent their spam from "something@" your domain.

When the various ISPs block the message, they send it back to the address in the "From:" section of the header. And, as you are finding out, that isn't always who REALLY originated the email.

Part of the cost of spam is now falling to you. Your bandwidth and mailbox space is being stolen by the spammers who are using your domain name to fool people into reading their messages.

There is a way to create a filter in Cpanel to send all messages not to a real email address on your domain to :blackhole:. Check into doing that to avoid these from clogging your mail box.

[bromide]

thanks for the help! i will look into the filter.

[Andy]

i noticed the last little while now my cpanel filters are not blocking emails anymore. They were working great until about 2 or 3 weeks ago

[furpcom]

I can not get the filters to work either.
Some one is spoofing my domain and I am getting up to 10,000 messages a day.
I really could use the filters, how do you get them to work?

Walter