Mail Delivery Failure Messages

Why I am getting notification of the delivery failure of e-mails that I have not sent?

You are receiving bounced spam messages that have been sent with your email address as the "From" address to non-existent email addresses.

What happens is that spammers send out spam with an address in the "From:" header other than theirs. This is known as "email spoofing" and is one technique used to hide the origin of a spam message. Spam is often sent to non-existent email addresses. When this happens the receiving mail server sends a "bounce" message, notifying the delivery failure of the message, to the address in the "From:" header.

In your case, some spam has been sent out with your address in the "From:" field and so any bounce messages are being sent to you.

Getting such messages can be very annoying but it will probably pass soon.

There have been many cycles in the past where a group of members will receive several hundred bounce messages over several days and then as the spammers move onto another domain the bounces die down.

What can I do about it?

If you receive one or two bounce messages consider that some of your legitimate mail may have an incorrect email address. If you receive a dozen to many hundreds, then your email address is being spoofed by a spammer (it happens to all well know email addresses sooner or later).

To save yourself the effort of cleaning them out of your inbox, you can set up filters in your mail program to filter all messages from "MAILER-DAEMON" or "postmaster" to a separate folder. (See the filtering page for how to set up a filter in your mail program, but you will have to set up filters based on the "From" address rather than the "Subject" line shown there).

You can delete them at your leisure. If the folder fills with dozens to hundreds of bounce messages, they are very likely to be in response to spoofed spam email sent to non-existent addresses. If there is just a small number then it may be in response to email that you have sent that has failed to be delivered.

If you want to avoid downloading any more such messages you can log in to web mail and delete them from the server before you download your mail. You could also use a program called MailWasher to delete all messages from MAILER-DAEMON. However by the time you install in and familiarise yourself with it, the messages may have stopped.

Why can't MelbPC filter out those messages before they get to me?

What you are receiving is genuine bounced email messages from legitimate mail servers when they receive messages to non-existent email addresses. As the mail server is legitimate, both Spamassassin and Greylisting will regard it as "white" and pass the email. Thus being on a mail server RBL or "real-time black list", one of the more powerful Spamassassin tools is not available. Spamassassin will apply its normal rules to the content, but this is diluted by the "genuine bounce content", so it will not detect many of the bounces as spam, but this depends on your "Mark score" level.