Why you get email bounced back that you never sent

Posted by Vic Laurie
June 12, 2008

Did you ever get email sent back to you marked as undeliverable that you never sent in the first place? Do you get messages from some site’s spam filters saying that an email from you (that you never sent) has been determined to be spam or, worse, pornography? You are not alone. You have been “backscattered”. Your email address has been forged in the “From” line of a spam mailing.

A weakness in the current email system is that anyone can enter any address they want in the “From” line. Spammers get hold of your email address and then use it to hide the source of spam mailings. Unfortunately, there isn’t much that you can do about it once spammers have your address. It is just another of the many ways that spammers make the Internet a lot less pleasant and a lot less easy to use.

Email, Security

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