client center
login

Release #1

What's up with...
"Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender"?
Are you seeing a lot of messages in your in box that are titled "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender"?
You're not alone. The global mail system is awash with these messages. But what you probably find most alarming about this situation, is the fact that all of these "bounce" messages, that keep coming to your mailbox, say that they were originally 'sent' by YOU! And you know this is impossible.

These "bounce" messages are an artifact of a massive on-going spam attack that involves literally millions of people all over the internet. The Signal mail system is sending this mail "back" to you because it thinks you sent it, and it has no way of knowing that you did not. The 'bounce' isn't actually an intended consequence of the spam attack, it's just a by-product. These returned messages are coming to you because criminal spambots are using your email address as the return address on their message when they spam other people. When some of these messages bounce because of bad recipient addresses (a huge number of messages are sent, and many have bad addresses), they come back to the labeled "sender"... in this case you. The root cause is ultimately the compromised machine that is doing the sending. Someone you know, who has your name in their address book, has had their computer hacked, and this machine, or some other in the bot network, is sending thousands upon thousands of pieces of mail every day, some of which have your address attached as the return address.

I'm afraid there's nothing we can do about this that is practical. We can't filter out mail that appears to have originated with you, nor can we block mail that is fraudulently coming back to you, even though it didn't really originate with you. We could implement an open standard technique involving what is called the "Sender Policy Framework", or SPF; but this can only work if both sides of a communication publish, and check, each other's SPF records; all your permitted senders would have to use SPF records in their mail. The internet is not quite there yet.

You can read about the SPF Framework here:

SPF Framework
For now we are stuck with a defective global mail protocol that allows mail fraud to go unchecked. This is certainly a very serious nuisance, but it is ultimately a much bigger problem than we can address ourselves. We're all stuck.

For perspective on the global spam problem check out the post I made yesterday on the new Signal Blog:

Srizbi grows into world's largest botnet
You're not imagining it! Spam is definitely getting worse. If you check your Postini quarantine every now and then you know just how bad it is. If we didn't have Postini we'd probably have stopped using mail a long time ago.

Dave