Help: my e-mail address is being spoofed by a spammer! (Summary)

[Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca>]

Yesterday, I reported that someone swiped my e-mail address and used it 
to spoof the "from:" line of their e-mail headers for a large volume of 
spam, leading to hundreds of e-mail error messages being sent to my 
account. More than 1600 last night alone! (Eek!)

Thanks for all the expressions of sympathy. Consensus is that there's 
not a lot I can do about this unless one of the bounced messages 
contains enough information to track down the spammer and shut 'em 
down. Nothing obvious, but I forwarded some of the more promising 
(complete) ones to my ISP for action.

I also took a closer look at the error messages and found the problem, 
and as it turns out, I was "lucky"*: the spammer used my Web site as 
the source of the spoofed address, and all the error mail was being 
forwarded to my main address (this one) after being handled by the site 
host's e-mail software.

* If it had been either of my primary addresses, I would have been 
blacklisted from here to darkest elbonia, and would have had to change 
e-mail addresses and notify all my friends, colleagues, and contacts.

Solutions? Once I finally got a clue and figured out the problem, I 
immediately notified my site host about the problem, and he disabled 
the e-mail forwarding within minutes. (Thanks, Eric!) That stopped the 
flood of mail in its tracks, at least for the moment. I also notified 
my ISP to ensure that if any complaints arrived, they'd have a report 
on file that I was the victim, not the victimizer. Phew!

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Geoff Hart   ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca
(try geoffhart -at- mac -dot- com if you don't get a reply)
www.geoff-hart.com
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