Telemicus — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 21:17:46 +0000

Thanks for the replies guys.
Yes you are probably right Greg - hijacking is the wrong word as essentially what you described is what has happened. The replies are all coming back to a 'catch all' email address at one of my sites. This is then forwarded to an email address I use regularly. So I have replies as mail undelivered back to these 'fake' from addresses that happen to relate to my site.

There is no form on my site in fact the only email address given is 'webmaster@'mysite'.com and this is not used at all.

The good news is that the activity seems to be dying down and I have had nothing in the last couple of hours.

Busy — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 20:24:17 +0000

Also do you have a contact form on your site?
if you dont have it set up for validation properly this is the new method they are using (not going into details and wont tell anyhow how to do it via PM so dont ask).

On the question about being banned, yes you will, if you are being hosted on a shared server the server itself gets blacklisted for spamming and your site name gets banned. If for example an AOL person cries spam, you'll find any mail you send to a AOL addy will be blocked and it only takes one or two persons these days to ruin ya day. You can get off the blacklists but is better for your host to do it than you as they have more clout.
Happenes to everyone now and then, hotmail is real bad for it

DC_Sara — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 15:58:15 +0000

Have you contacted your host?

Greg K — Wed, 02 Nov 2005 15:25:24 +0000

It is definately a pain in the rump. I've had that happen several times. I just ride it out for the day or two it happens.

Also, I feel the term "hijacked" it doesn't fit. This implies (to me anyhow) that they took over control of the domain name. Most likely all they did was fake the "FROM:" field in a bunch of spam e-mail they sent out.

I used to think this was the biggest pain with e-mail, until they started giving up on actual e-mail addresses, and started sending e-mail to a list of "common names" at my domain name. Since I receive EVERYTHING @ mydomian I started getting over 1000 e-0mails a day, about 20 of them the same thing... sent to Bob@ Mike@, Dave@, Eric@, John@, Mark@, Steve@, etc.

When that starts happening, what a pain, so hard to set up filters for all those....

-Greg