Spam Question

[MoonFaery]

I read over some of the previous threads about spam, but I wasn't able to find the answer so hopefully I am just not repeating myself

 

I have a gmail account in case and so I don't have to list my domain(s) email address. I went to check it for any important emails and got an email from someone unknown saying that if they get anymore spam from me that they will report me as spamming.

 

I have no clue who this person is. Is this something I should be worried about? I mean, I know it is pretty easy to change the address from where you are sending. But there are still a lot of ummm computer illiterate people out there that don't know something like that

 

[Sully]

You didn't say: did this email come to your GMail account or to your TCH domain account?

 

It's possible that someone is sending mail through your account, and since it sounds like you have your email account to show your GMail address as the return address, the person getting "spammed" by you (even if unknowingly) is in fact fairly computer literate and saw where your return address and email header/server info don't match.

 

Have you checked your stats page in cPanel to see if you're getting any hits from weird places? I did that a while back, and realized my phpBB had been vandalized; I didn't realize it, because I had not been using that part of my site, but I was able to track who did it by going through the stats page.

 

You may have already done all of this, and if so, ignore my comments! If not, I hope this helps.

 

Sully

[MoonFaery]

No, this is all through my gmail account thankfully. This person just out of the blue emailed me at my gmail address with that.

 

I mean, I know it is possible.. I've done it to test before (not that the spammers are using outlook express), but you can change the from address to anything@youwish.com and the receiving person will see that it is coming from anything@youwish.com even though it really came from nobody@anywhere.org

[TCH-Don]

Your gmail address in on your site.

So its probably been harvested by spam bots, or others.

 

I found out the hard way about this years ago.

If you want people to contact you

I would use a form that hard codes your email in the form processor.

[Deverill]

Don's advice is great advice. The benefit of that is that your server, which processes the form, is the only one that knows your email address in the end - you aren't trusting their browser to keep it quiet or anything.

 

Also, make sure you have a way to get new addresses if one becomes trashed - it's harder with a business address but for personal stuff it's easy - 1@mytchacct.com, 2@mytchacct.com, spam@mytchacct.com (for web signups I don't ever want to hear from again), etc.

 

Most of the time, if someone says you are spamming them and you aren't, it's just cuz someone has scammed/harvested your email address. Too bad the end-recipients don't always get it though.

[MoonFaery]

Thank you very much Don and Jim

 

A related question.. Say I create spam@**** and I don't go into the account and it accumalates spam. Wouldn't all that affect how much space I am using for hosting? I mean, I know most emails don't amount to anything more than 5k, but anybody that had a hotmail account or anything with a small limit knows quite well eventually even a 250mg box can get filled

[TCH-Thomas]

Here´s what I would do.

 

Create forwarder in cpanel, lets say "spam@yourtchdomain.com" forward it to you@gmail.com. When you see spam coming in to the newly created yourtchdomain account, you just go in to cpanel again and delete the forwarder to gmail.

Please note: This is what I would do, but I am sure there are other ways too.

[Deverill]

You can use your email filtering to delete anything that comes in. Sorry I don't have the proper syntax but it would be using a regex where subject matches anything - go to discard.