How are spammers able to hack into my emails? I use MailWasher to preview and bounce my emails before using Outlook Express. MailWasher is a fine programme but inevitably there are some emails it cannot bounce because there is no return address on the cover and such emails have obviously been hacked in.

And therein lies the problem. I see from the source of hacked emails that there are handling addresses there. So how would I go about bouncing the emails back to the handlers?

Here is a typical hacked email I received recently

X-Apparently-To: me@mine.net via 66.163.179.115; Sun, 19 Aug 2007 02:24:48 -0700

X-YahooFilteredBulk: 222.34.173.179

X-Originating-IP: [222.34.173.179]

Authentication-Results: mta454.mail.mud.yahoo.com from=; domainkeys=neutral (no sig)

Received: from 222.34.173.179 (HELO 209.191.88.239) (222.34.173.179)

by mta454.mail.mud.yahoo.com with SMTP; Sun, 19 Aug 2007 02:24:46 -0700

Received: from 210.62.62.95 by 222.34.173.179; Thu, 23 Aug 2007 11:18:25 +0200

Message-ID: <C[20

NOTE:- me@mine.net is my email address (not my real one of course!)

Comments and advice welcome! I've asked Yahoo to trace back these hacks in the past but they're just not interested enough.

Edited August 19, 200719 yr by celtish

I suppose you know that the largest proportion of spam is now sent from open proxies (that is, other personal computers which have been infected with a botnet trojan)? The botnet herders are very accomplished at falsifying the email headers.

Therefore, Mailwasher's "bounce" function is positioned somewhere between useless and harmful - you are actually doubling the spam traffic on the internet if you bounce, and whichever poor Joe's machine sent the email has no idea why a message from a stranger has returned to their account. You will NOT reduce your volume of spam by bouncing messages, except in isolated cases.

Just switch off Mailwasher's bounce function and live with the spam. Adding more filters to the MW list may help to distinguish the spam mails from the ham more clearly.

Don't bounce spam, report it with SpamCop (http://spamcop.net/). I haven't used Mailwasher in a long time, but it may have a feature that will let you submit spam to SpamCop fairly easily.

Phil

Instead of SpamCop (or in addition to it), you could use Complainterator. I've heard that it does a good job of getting the domain registrars to revoke the domains that are being used by spammers.

Phil

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