◆◆Protect your email address from the email harvesting Spambots!!◆◆

There have been a flurry of anxious discussions among email list and newsletter owners recently about spammers stealing their email identity by spoofing the "from" field of spam mailings. They know they are being spoofed because they are suddenly getting an avalanche of bounce notices returned to their email when they didn't send the email that bounced! Those webmasters and list owners that have their email identity stolen in this way are most often those that have the most to lose if their business is reported for spamming.

List owners whose income is dependent on advertising that runs in their newsletter or ezine cannot afford to be shut down by a host that responds to spam complaints without any serious investigation. Automated reporting systems often list the domain, or worse, sometimes entire IP blocks, of accused spammers - whether or not those accusations have any merit.SPAMMERS DISLIKE ANTI-SPAM ADVOCATES

I've been the victim of these faked addresses for a couple of years because I have an anti-spam tutorial at Website101 and it must attract spammers looking for something. It's pretty well ranked in the search engines for several spam terms and gets a lot of traffic for Website101. They lift my email address and use it in their spam campaigns.

http://website101.com/SpamFilter/

When I started getting those bounced emails from sources I hadn't sent to, I was so alarmed at the implications for the integrity of my online businesses that I quickly sent a copy of the bounces to my host to let them know that it *WAS NOT ME* sending those emails that were creating the bounces. They took a look at the headers and could see that it was spoofed and not really from me, since they host my site, I guess they can tell easily. I was relieved, but continued to send those bounces to them whenever I got them to let them know I was not the source of the spam causing those bounces and that they may get spam complaints about them.

Eventually, one of my host "abuse" techs sent me an email letting me know that they could tell I wasn't doing it and that I needn't be concerned about being shut down since I had pointed out my anti-spam tutorial and my own articles about the issue in my tutorial.

LIST OWNERS AND WEBMASTERS ARE SPAM SPOOF TARGETS

If you suddenly start receiving multiple bounce notices with quoted spam emails bearing your email "from" address, send them, including headers, to your host "abuse" address and proactively protect yourself from false claims. I've even had email discussion with anti-spam Gestapos about the problem and made certain they know my stance on spam and that I am not the source of those bounces when they got complaints through their reporting & automated blacklisting system.

Sorry, I'll have to stop here today...
Tomorrow, we'll talk about A NEW SOLUTION TO SPAM HARVESTING BOTS

Here are some usefull links:
Registry Cleaner - FREE download.
Search & Destroy - FREE software (don't need lisence)
Anti Spam Filter - Click Here