Technical help required from people who know computery things

[brixtonbrood]

A voluntary organisation I work with has a problem with one of the e-mail addresses. The person to whom the e-mails redirect says she keeps finding spam in her personal junk folder addressed from the official address (as opposed to having been redirected from it).
This seems different to the problem which I've had before, of receiving bounce notifications as a result of someone happening to use your address as a fake header from their spam, because that goes out to random individuals not to people on your address list.

Any thoughts?

Comments

[geekette8.livejournal.com]

It's quite common to get spam both from and to the same address; could they have got redirected to her personal folder that way?

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this isn't especially unusual (especially at the moment, sadly).

It would be a good idea to block stuff, or mark as spam, mail coming in from _outside_ their system purporting to be from an address _inside_ their system -- if they can.

[brixtonbrood.livejournal.com]

So what do we do? She was suggesting a new address for that function, but it would be really inconvenient of course. Is this the sort of thing that just goes away when the host's spam filters catch up with the particular algorithms which we're getting caught by? or is it likely to linger on for so long that it's worth changing address?

[asajeffrey.livejournal.com]

Some firewalling and mail policy might do the trick.

1. At your firewall, block internet traffic coming from outside your private network with an IP address claiming to be from inside.

2. At your mail server, block email coming from an IP address outside your private network with an email address claiming to be from inside.

The main problem with doing this is that it blocks some valid email, e.g. if you've outsourced helpdesk@foo.org, then you need to add them to a whitelist, sigh.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

It tends not to last particularly long for any given address so it's unlikely to be worth changing. You might suggest that she has a chat with either or both of (a) her ISP, (b) the ISP who is handling the redirection of the mail -- but if this is the only mail she's getting which is "from" the email address in question then just marking that as junk ought to do it. (And yes, echoing undyingking, why is she actually worrying about this if it's winding up in her junk folder anyway?)

[tea-and-cuddles.livejournal.com]

In my experience it can last for several months if you're unlucky. I was getting some 7000 a day that way, but that's extreme.

[bibliogirl.livejournal.com]

Of this sort, or of the joe-job (i.e. your email address used as the return address or sender address on spam) sort, though?

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

Short answer: put up with it. There is currently no easy solution.

But decent junk filters can spot it without any trouble -- so unless the person concerned is feeling some sort of deep existential disturbance from seeing this stuff appear in her junk folder, she should be able to happily just ignore it.