On 7/18/06, Steve Bennett stevagewp@gmail.com wrote:

Sorry for this totally off topic question about spam, but there seem to be some pretty cluey people on this list.

In the last couple of months, I've been getting a lot of email replies to emails I never sent, including a lot of spam challenge-responses and a few "I'm out of the office" type messages. I have two theories:

• I have some malware on my computer sending out emails.
• Someone is forging mails with my address as the sender.

A common technique with spam, and even more so with viruses, is to forge the "from" address. This serves the double purpose of hiding the true source of the email, and maybe hitting a "from" address that will let the email through the recipient's filters. If this is done to flood a user's mail system, or to defame them, it's known as a [[Joe job]].

I should point out that any mail at the stevage.com domain gets to me, so quite a few messages are addressed to asdfdasd@stevage.com etc.

That's a result of "dictionary spamming": a spam program takes a dictionary of common usernames and a domain name, and puts them together to try to guess valid email addresses.

Amazingly, the article on [[E-mail spam]] doesn't have much coverage of this. If someone can come up with a good source, it should be added.