I’ve been getting an extraordinary amount of spam bounce email. One mailbox got thousands and thousands over the weekend, and I know I’m not the only one.

Which means of course that my address is being used in vain by some git of a spammer.

Unfortunately my spam detection software isn’t so crash hot on zapping the bounces, because it’s a bounce, not an actual spam message. And there’s probably not much to be done about spammers forging my address.

After trying in vain to keep up with it all, I eventually blocked the common bounce From address, by adding them to the Plesk blacklist:

mailer-daemon@*
postmaster@*

Hardly ideal, since I’d never see genuine bounces. But it has slowed the flow.

What’s annoying is that about 10-20% of bounces come from a myriad of other addresses. These include the intended recipient’s address, and a variety of apparently semi-random addresses set up as support emails or automatic bounce processes.

There’s also a smattering of “MAILER-DAEMON@” — which isn’t even a legal address. And a lot of them come in with no date field. Very dodgy!

HOW ABOUT SOME STANDARDISATION, PEOPLE?

And maybe it’s time someone came up with a viable way of verifying sender addresses, and stopping From address fraud.