We must get 5 customers a day asking us about all these undeliverable messages they are getting that aren't messages they even sent to people. It looks like someone has used your email account to spam someone else and you are getting the undeliverables from it.. scarey! Well it seems scarey but let me shed some light on what is actually happening...the spammers are getting smarter.

Here is what they do in simple terms.

1. Find or create a mailbox somewhere on the net that they know will create an undeliverable message when mail is sent to it.
2. Create a wonderful spam message and put the email address of the people they want to receive it (LIKE YOURS) in the "FROM" field.
3. Send those messages to the mailbox in step 1 above.

So the spammer sends the message from a server somewhere on the Internet (Usually China - Russia - Africa) to a mailbox that will bounce the message back to you because they put your email address in the "FROM" field.  Then you get the undeliverable and wonder to yourself "Umm an important message I sent came back undeliverable I better look at it" and you open it to find their spam message they wanted you to get.
Though this seems clever (many other words come to mind as well but I will spare you) it is quite simple and easy for them to do.

Some important points to know:

• They DID NOT hijack your email account to send those messages. They used some other server and spoofed your email address in the "FROM" field of the email so you would get the undeliverable/spam message of theirs.
• Hosted Exchange Providers like us at the moment cannot stop them from doing this.
• It is UNLIKELY that you have a virus sending these out but it is always good practice to run the latest anti-virus software.
• You can set-up separate rules in outlook to handle undeliverable messages in a certain way. Like if you don't want them forwarded to your mobile phone for example.
• Here is a document released by Postini our Spam Filter company on what they are doing to decrease the number of these undeliverable spam messages in your inbox. - PDF Download

All in all this is another deceptive practice used by spammers to get their junk into our inboxes and render a normally useful tool like undeliverable messages a victim of spammer exploitation.