Spoofing

[Anonymous]

It appears that my email address may have been spoofed.  I have received lots of Mail Delivery Service emails saying that emails weren't delivered to accounts I have never heard of.

I have AVG, MalwareBytes, Adaware, SpyBot search and destroy and Zone Alarm installed on my PC so I am confident that my PC has not been hacked.  However, at the time of receiving the Mail Delivery emails I did receive a spoofed email and the name was someone I know (the email address was very stange).

I contacted O2 customer support and they said they were unfamilar with the term "spoofing", so there was nothing they could do.  What shall I do? change my email address perhaps?

[adamtemp64]

firstly change your wembail / o2 account password then search these forums for webmail issues.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, but I don't think that will make any difference as the account seems to be spoofed and not hacked.

[Anonymous]

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However, at the time of receiving the Mail Delivery emails I did receive a spoofed email and the name was someone I know (the email address was very stange).

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I would ask that person to do a virus scan on their PC.

[MI5]

I contacted O2 customer support and they said they were unfamilar with the term "spoofing", so there was nothing they could do. 

This has gone to the top of my all time favourite quotes

[Anonymous]

Thanks NPR +1.  Perhaps they got my email address off that PC.

What would you suggest I do?

[Anonymous]

It is possible that PC is infected with a spam bot.
But there's also plenty of other opportunities for spammers to get and spoof your email address.
This includes supposedly respectable companies selling email lists 😞
Note: some of these "mail delivery service" email are no genuine they are them selves spam, trying to verify genuine addresses.

My choice is to just ignore this. I direct all my mail through gmail which has a excellent spam filter. Although one of my addresses receives upwards of 100 spam per day I rarely see any of it.
ie I have my own domain names and use the free google apps for all of them.

[Anonymous]

NPR, thanks again.  Can I confirm that you understand the difference between sending spam and receiving spam.  I receive lots of spam every day, but I have only started recently receiving mail delivery failures which suggests spammers are sending email using my account using 'spoofing'.  Do you still think I should ignore it? What if the volume of message sent failures does not fall?

[Anonymous]

There's not much else you can do, can't track them down or stop them.
Well you could look in the header to see where it came from but that's probably spoofed or from a spam bot.

I would not expect your email address to get black listed because of this. O2 mail has a SPF record attached (set to soft fail) which will prove to anyone (auto checked by mail servers) the email is not from a O2 server and is therefore suspect / spoofed.

No good though if the spoof does come from a O2 account, SPF has many problem 😞

I would alert the other person though.

"Can I confirm that you understand the difference between sending spam and receiving spam."

Err, yes. 

[Anonymous]

NPR, thanks.

I was thinking about changing my O2 username.  Would this change the email address as well? i.e. username@o2.co.uk.