Email from yourself and spoofing your address

[crobertson]

Email from yourself and someone spoofing your email address are two of the only problems we have with our email now.

I have a solution for the emailing myself, although it doesn't stop the originator. It is one of the only ways to get around my boxtrapper, of course you can always blacklist your own email address.

The second is I put an client filter that says
if the message is from (my email address)
and
does NOT have (my name) in the body
then discard with message, or something to that effect. Now if I ever must email myself, I just make sure my name is in the body. My first name is not part of my email address so the spammers don't usually have it in the body of the email.

Spoofing my email address usually runs its course but we have had the ocassion that it happens so long a email hoster will warn you to stop spamming or they will hold your account. Not nice at all.

Then there is the intentional failure spoof where they don't email you, but send to a bogus email address and it comes in with a failure message. This way the from address is your ISP, and NOT your own email.

There is almost nothing you can do about that event, but there is something that your ISP can usually do. Some do have software that compares the failure against the originating emails from your account and determine that the email is a spoof. (Go Daddy did this for me) This is suppose to be a version of spam assasin for a server. (so I'm told) They also researched the IP address of the spoofer, and contacted their ISP and it stopped.

Now keep in mind, you can get a new ip address regularly with DSL, but the first octect or two indicate the primary ISP. You can also do this with if you go immediately and track down the ip address UNLESS they are using a proxy server.

If anyone else has solutions to these issues, please add them on.
Please remember this isn't a weiner measuring contest, so I don't need Mr. Smarty pants trying to debunk everything I said.

[EricJ]

You should look into getting an SPF record if this is becoming a serious problem. It's a special domain level record that will help stop spoofing in it's tracks.

When you do get one, create a ticket in A Record/MX/Cname Changes.. and support will install it for you.

Go here for some more information on SPF records.