Worried about email hijacking/spam bounces in your domain email?

A couple of Munuvians have been panicked by what appears to be a hijacking of their Mu.nu email, most recently GM Roper in the previous post.

Because this has come up a couple of times (Mad Mikey had the same concern back in January) I've put together a post titled Do bounced spam messages in your domain email mean you've been hacked? explaining the problem and giving step-by-step instructions for how to fix it.

Essentially, what folks are seeing is the result of a significant flaw in the email protocol which allows anyone to send an email which pretends to be from somebody else.

So a spammer simply finds a live domain - yours, in this case - and makes up any number of fake addresses at that domain. He then sends massive numbers of spam messages with all those fake mu.nu addresses as the spoofed 'from:' address. When those messages go to undeliverable addresses, as most inevitably do, the bounce message comes back to you because the spammer made it look like you sent them originally, even though you didn't.

Check out the post for 'the rest of the story'.

Paul