Re: People forging their From: addresses

[Nate Waddoups <]

On Thu, 17 Sep 1998, Mihai Ibanescu wrote:

> A guy from one of AT&T's relays pretends he is oneaddress@localhost. He
> sends TONS of mails to every possible address at AOL. Since a lot of those
> addresses don't exist, AOL sends to postmaster@localhost all the error
> messages. This is not exactly spam, but it's annoying because I get tons
> of replays from AOL users that mydomain.ro is spamming, which is NOT true.
> 
> 	What can be done in a situation like this? Complaining about it to
> AT&T about their poor relaying is not a solution, I think.

This may constitute a denial of service attack, which is a crime in the
US.  If the spammer lives/works in the US, you may be able to recover
damages from them, while discouraging other spammers from using the same
tactics, and increasing the public awareness that spamming is just plain
wrong. 

If you're interested in exploring your legal options, let me know.  I know
of a lawyer who may be interested in representing you. 

I cannot help but wonder why spammers choose to use legitimate domain
names when they forge "From" headers.  What good could it possibly do
them, as opposed to just using something that doesn't exist?  Puzzling.

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Assume just 4 million businesses on the Internet today...
If 1% of them sent you one piece of junk email per year,
you'd still have to wade through over 100 messages per day.