Some completely unenlightened soul who thinks that selling crap via spam is a worthwhile use of his/her lifespan decided to make my day fairly annoying. One standard piece of these asshat’s toolbox is forging the sender information in their spam messages and today they decided to use a few made up addresses at a domain I own (but don’t actively use for now).
Of course not all of the addresses in their lists are accurate although the mail server is specified correctly. So sending email to 45west@example.com, where example.com is a working mail server but 45west is non-functional, means that the mail server will attempt to be nice and tell the sender there’s a problem with delivering the mail–I’m sure you’ve all gotten such messages. But when you receive literally hundreds of these bounce messages in a single day, that really sucks.
Checking with Support at my (reasonably excellent) hosting provider PHPWebHosting.com, I found there’s little to be done about this but on the bright side spammers tend to only use a given domain once. And people/groups that keep the spam blacklists understand this and add domains to their database based on the sender’s IP, not the return email address.
BillSaysThis 