KnowledgeBase Articles » A Spammer is spoofing my e-mail address to my organization!

Thursday, November 22, 2012, 15:36

A Spammer is spoofing my e-mail address to my organization!

Category: General

Solution ID: 00000181

Summary:

A Spammer is spoofing my e-mail address when sending spam to me; what do I do?

Answer:

E-mail is very prone to this sort of thing. When an e-mail is crafted, you can say you are anyone you wish! Spammers take advantage of this to give themselves more credibility and deflect bounce messages to other people.

PerfectMail has anti-spoof settings to help prevent this sort of abuse. On the user interface, go to the Filter Settings page  Filters > Filter Settings > Sender  tab. There are three options available:

• Verify e-mail address - Verify the existence of e-mail addresses from hosted domain, but coming from the outside.
• Block self sent e-mail - Block all e-mail from the outside that is reportedly from a hosted domain.
• Block all - Block all e-mail from the outside that is reportedly from a hosted domain.

The best way to block this sort of thing is using Sender Policy Framework (SPF). SPF is implemented as a DNS entry for your domain. It specifies what hosts are valid for sending mail for your domain. Any other host should be considered a hoax.

You can get more information on crafting an SPF Record by going to http://www.openspf.org/. On this page there is a section called "Deploying SPF", with a web form for crafting an SPF record (currently set to example.com). Use this to craft an SPF record for your domain.

Many e-mail hosts and even anti-spam filters are not making use of SPF records, so there will always be a number of false messages being delivered; but this is the best method available to us at this time.

Tags: spam, e-mail, antispam, spammer, spoofing, address, incoming

Link to this article: https://perfectmail.com/kb/spammer_spoofing_my_email

Updated: Thursday, November 22, 2012, 15:36

-- David Rutherford