[Spambayes] Offtopic - getting bounce messages for spam

[Matt Sergeant]

Paul Moore said the following on 19/11/02 19:19:
> Sorry, this is offtopic, but I'm hoping that the concentration of spam
> experts on this group may be able to help me.
> 
> I've just started receiving undeliverable message reports for spam,
> sent to people I've never heard of. It looks to me like someone is
> managing to impersonate me when they send spam out. I'm fairly sure
> I'm not running an open relay (is there a way of checking for
> certain?), so I guess someone is spoofing headers or something. I've
> heard of this sort of thing before, but never experienced this myself.

It's called a Joe-Job. I get these *all* the time. See the Spam-L FAQ 
(google will find it for you) for details.

> Two questions, really:
> 
> a) Is this something I should worry about (am I likely to end up on
>    blacklists or the like)?
> b) What can I do about it in any case?

There's little you can do except try and detect it and dump the mails, 
unless you want to spend the effort finding which relay it came 
through/from and trying to get the IP added to various DNSBL's. Though 
the problem is you have to know what DNSBL's the mail server that the 
bounce is coming from uses.

Generally I ignore them - they tend to last a day or so before moving on 
to annoy someone else.

Matt.