Well, it looks like the spammers are really upping their sending of email from addresses they do not own. You know what we are talking about. All of a sudden your inbox is filled with un-deliverable messages that you did not send, and they keep coming for about 1 or 2 days, and then begin to stop. This can happen for a lot of reasons, including most likely one of the 2:
1) Spammer taking email addresses from websites, and then sending bulk email to large groups of people using your address as the return address
2) An individual’s computer has been infected with virus, spyware or trojan which in turn makes the computer a zombie spam sending computer, sending out all sorts of spam with a return address from the individuals email address book.
Well, there is something you can do to at least reduce the possibility of this happening. The fix is to setup SPF DNS records on your email domain name, which in turn tells all email servers (SPF rated of course) of the world which email servers are permitted to send emails with that particular return address. As long as you define in that SPF record those methods used for that particular domain (i.e. SMTP servers, blackberry email servers, Exchange servers), it really limits what the spammers can do.
Now, if you use a generic email address (i.e. name@aol.com, name@gmail.com, name@yahoo.com), you cannot setup a SPF record for those cases. To have the control to setup SPF records for yourself, you need your own domain name, with email going there instead. Then, you need to setup the SPF DNS entries (which requires some technical knowledge, and admin access to the domain’s DNS records).
We can help setup these SPF records as part of our service. Feel free to contact us at http://computerperson.com/contact.php for assistance. For more information on SPF records, here are some other sites you can reference:
1) Microsoft’s SPF Technology brief.
2) Microsoft’s Sender ID Framework SPF Record Wizard .
3) OpenSPF Syntax Web Site.