Spam, the Peoples' Enemy Number One.

We all know that spam is a huge nuisance to companies, large and small, and to individuals, choking up inboxes, incurring costs in purchasing anti-spamware, and wasting valuable time in deleting the ones that inevitably get past the system.
But something you may not know, is that a huge percentage of spam is actually caused by the mailing servers that handle your emails.
That's right, you could be being spammed by the mail servers!
A lot of people who own a company or personal web site with a domain name will have experienced the surprise of opening up their inbox one morning to find it absolutely clogged up with returned messages saying something like 'failed delivery' and then some explanation of why it couldn't be delivered. On closer inspection it all turns out to be spam and appears to have originated from your domain name and is addressed to a load of different companies that you have never heard of.
Here's how it happens.
The web host that hosts your domain name, it may be the same as the web host that hosts your web site or it may not, will have provided you with a webmail account. The settings for this web mail account are often set at 'catch all' and sometimes 'forward to' the email that you gave when you registered for the account. Let's say your domain name is www.mybusiness.com, 'catch all' means that an email addressed to any combination of legal characters before @mybusiness.com will be received in your webmail account. So, for instance admin@mybusiness.com, sales@mybusiness.com, or just a collection of random letters such as awtse@mybusiness.com, will all be accepted. This is useful for companies because if a prospective customer makes a typo or spelling error in the part before @mybusiness.com, the email will still be delivered. It is even more useful for the spammers because they can spam your webmail account directly with random names or letters @mybusiness.com. Now you can prevent the direct spamming quite easily by assigning a few 'hard to guess' names to your webmail account, (not like sales, or admin), and disable the 'catch all. Or, if you wanted to keep the 'catch all' you could invest in some good spam filtering software. But, and this is the crucial bit, there is worse to come.
Email programs such as Outlook Express and Mozilla Thunderbird have a field in the header called 'reply to'. Don't ask me why, before we had email would anyone have written to a person in a company and then said reply to somebody else? I think not. Anyway, the spammer, having harvested 100s or even 1000s of email addresses off the Internet chooses, from a search engine say, a domain name, and it happens to be www.mybusiness.com. He then sets things up so that when his spam emails go out they all have random names or letters @mybusiness.com in the 'reply to' field. The large majority of the spam emails are rejected by the recipients' spam filters, so, the recipients' mail server, instead of returning the emails to the spammer's email address, bounces them to the address that is shown in the 'reply to' field with a 'failed delivery' notice.
Hence mybusiness.com, who is completely innocent, is now being spammed by the mail servers.
The second consequence of this is that the spam that does get through to its intended recipient appears to be coming from mybusiness.com as the spammers often attempt to conceal the original sender leaving the 'reply to' field as the only clue. The owner of mybusiness.com is now suspected, by all the recipients of the spam who don't know about this ploy, of being a spammer himself instead of a victim of spam and his site's reputation is being tarnished.
The worst thing is that, although he can disable 'catch all' to prevent the bounced spam filling his mailbox, there is nothing he can do about this misuse of his domain name.
A further consequence, if mybusiness.com does disable 'catch all', is this. The failed delivery notices are now rejected by mybusiness.com and are delivered back to the original recipient, who rejects them and sends them back to mybusiness.com, who rejects them....... You get the picture. A sort of ping pong effect is created which all contributes to clogging up the mail system.

Now here is one thing I think could be done about this situation.
We need a law passed that would compel the mail servers to return undeliverable mail to the sender and not to the address in the 'reply to' field. At the moment spammers can spam with no consequences. This change would mean that the spammers, because all the 'failed delivery' emails would now be sent to them, would end up being spammed by their own spam! Now that would be poetic justice.
The U.S.A. is one of the largest originators of spam along with China. If the U.S.A. and the E.U. were to co-operate and pass a law such as this, then maybe other countries could be persuaded to follow. Of course, that would only be a start in tackling spam, but if we don't start somewhere the whole mail system will eventually become totally unusable.
A final point. You may be wondering how come I know so much about all this? Well I'll tell you. I had to research it because the scenario described above has happened to me. My perfectly respectful business has a domain name which has been picked by a spammer. It makes me really angry to think that spam is being sent all over the world with my domain name on it.
As far as I'm concerned, the only good spammer is a dead spammer!