Usually when mass spam email is sent out the spammers use a random email address at a random domain name as the reply address for the email.

 

If you are receiving lots of 'bounce back' or 'undelivered' emails from addresses that you do not recognise then it is highly likely that your domain name has been used as the reply address.

 

It is very easy to send out emails using someone else's reply address, there are no mechanisms to prevent this, and spammers use this shortcoming to give their email more credability.

 

This is not a security breach of  your email account - no-one has hacked your email, but others will be receiving spam emails (assuming they do not use antispam software) and it will look like it has come from your domain. However, if they actually check the email header it can be proved that the email did not originate from your outgoing mail server but instead from some other bulk mailserver elsewhere in the world.

 

Many people do use antispam software which rejects the email anyway and because the reply address is at your domain, you receive the rejection email. Similarly if the original spam email was addressed to a non-existent email address you will receive the rejection email.

 

The resulting 'undelivered' emails that you receive in quantity are an annoyance, but not a security issue.

 

 

The 'undelivered' email is a valid email and should not be blocked as one day you may incorrectly address an email to someone and will want to know that it did not get there, and for the same reason antispam systems will not block these emails.

 

However, the reason that you are receiving these emails is probably becuase your email account is configured as a 'catch-all' account. This means that you will receive emails for anything@yourdomain.com ie. it doesn't matter what someone puts before the @ symbol the email will still be delivered to you.

 

If your email is hosted with Pure Energy we can reconfigure your email account so only certain email addresses will come through and everything else will be rejected. For example we can configure your email so that only sales@, info@, fred@, sarah@ and accounts@ will be let through and everything else would be rejected.

 

You may already have emails addressed to individuals in the above way, but have one of them configured as the 'default' or 'catch-all' address, in this case we can simply disable that account from being the default.

 

This does mean that if someone sends you an email that is addressed to a non-existant user at your domain you will not receive it but the sender will receive a notification of this and can then contact you using alternative means.

 

This minor inconvenience needs to be weighed up against the hassle of deleting loads of emails each morning, and many companies choose to take this option without hesitation.

 

Please contact Pure Energy if you would like us to reconfigure your email account to prevent these 'undelivered' emails. We do not charge for making these changes.

 

If your email or website is not hosted with Pure Energy you will need to contact your hosting company and ask them to make these changes. If they make a charge or say that this is not possible, then you might want to consider transferring you hosting to us ... :-)