Mailer Daemon?

[thebeard]

Since the 1st, my email accounts associated with one of my addons has been bombarded by these MAILER-DAEMON returns. Similar to the one listed below. What's going on with this?

"Hi. This is the qmail-send program at outbound-mail-x1.bluehost.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<mercedesbereavejewell@united.com>:
165.212.65.113 does not like recipient.
Remote host said: 550 <mercedesbereavejewell@united.com>... User not known. Giving up on 165.212.65.113."

[areidmtm]

Looks like a spam bot is trying to send out spam from one of your emails. Unfortunately there is no way of stopping this. They only thing you can do is not to post your email address on the web.

Use some kind of email encoder or better, use an online forum. This way email harvesters wont grab your email address.

[felgall]

Whatever method you use to try to protect your email address will not stop a spammer just happening to enter your address at random as the To or From address in any email that they send (particularly if you set up a common address such as webmaster@example.com or john@example.com which are always worthwhile for spammers to try just in case you have set up such an obvious address).

The simplest solution to getting messages like this is to update your spam filtering to remove all such messages to your junk folder or even to delete them completely without your seeing them as 99.9% of such messages will be bounced spam where the spammer has taken two opportunities to get the email delivered to someone by specifying both To and From addresses. Only in about 0.1% of cases will such a message be a bounce of an email that you actually sent that can't be delivered and many email servers are now set to not produce bounce messages at all so as to not contribute to spam by bouncing messages to innocent third parties (so you will only see a small fraction of legitimate bounces of emails you sent anyway)..