Email Spoofing

Preamble: As this my first post of the year – Happy New Year

Recently someone has been sending spam and pretending it is from me (from beginstahome.com to be exact). A quick Google of the term “email spoofing� suggests that this problem is widespread and unfortunately it does not take much to spoof an address. All one has to do is change the “From� and/or “Reply-To� section of their email sending application. It really is that simple and it allows spammers to send mail without revealing where it originated from.

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For a person whose email has been spoofed there are two main reasons why this is annoying.

Firstly it undoubtedly damages the reputation of your site and your domain name. Being labelled a spammer is to a domain name what a record of bankruptcy is to one’s credit rating.

Secondly and this is perhaps the more noticeable of the two, once your email has been spoofed you are likely to see an increase in bounced email/mail failure notification emails. This is usually how most people have find out that their domain names are being abused. Unless a spammer/spoofer has a list of valid email address they will generate what they think are real sounding email addresses, relying on suffixes such as [at]hotmail[dot]com, [at]aol[dot]com etc. Often a spammer/spoofer will attempt to hit hundreds of inboxes using one email. A spammer/spoofer will also attempt to send hundreds of emails in just a short space of time. The result is that multiple inboxes are being hit by multiple emails all supposedly coming from a legitimate source and a good number of those inboxes do not exist. This in turn generates a large number of mail failure notifications being sent back to the legitimate domain name’s default email account.

This is exactly the situation I found myself in towards the end of last year and I emailed my web hosting company informing them of this. Within 24 hours I received an email from them telling me the problem should have stopped and indeed it had. There was no explanation as to what they did however I am used to my host not providing explanations for things that go wrong with my site.

A week later the problem restarted and this morning I emailed my host this time asking for an explanation as to what they did last time. About two hours ago I received this email from my host

Kui,
You will need to pull down your contact form as it is been exploited to send the spam, http://www.beginsathome.com/contact.php This issue is also overloading our servers so it is essential that you take it down immediately.

Best Regards,

Naeem
Customer Service Team
StudentWebHosting
Low Cost Web Hosting Solutions

Now, while I am not an expert in computer related matters I do however live by the motto “Google and Wikipedia are your friends.â€? Furthermore, my fiancé has a PhD in Computer Science so it is fair to say that I knows people who knows their stuff. More importantly (thanks to my “friends” and my fiancé) I know that my contact form can not be held responsible for email spoofing.

I fully appreciate that email spoofing is baffling business everywhere. I don’t expect my hosting company to wave a magic wand and eliminate the problem. What has really made mad is the fact that my host are suggesting that I am in some way at fault and are demanding that I remove what is an essential aspect of my site.

Can you imagine the furore it would cause if the people at Blogger demand their users immediately disable their comment facility as it was generating too much spam! I am not suggesting that this is the same, however I am aware that I have two blogs on this site. I also have 5 email aliases linked to this domain and I do not want to have to worry that at any given time my host will ask me to close down or remove one of these.

This is not the first time my host has let me down. A little over a year ago my blog vanished for a few days and my host’s response was almost laughable. I am one of those people who are anal about good customer service. I have stuck with our phone company despite them being more expensive than others simply because they have good customer service. The reserve of this is being that I am more than willing to leave what is a cheap hosting service with poor customer service for a more expensive one with better customer service.

I have written to my host informing that their response was inadequate. I have outline what email spoofing is and how my contact form is not to blame. I have also explained to them that I do take measures to combat spam from reaching my inbox however I can not stop spam from hitting their servers and that a contact form is perfectly acceptable element of a website which I am not willing to part with. I have made it very clear that should they feel that they are not in a position to meet my hosting needs then they should simply say so and I shall move my site (contact form and all) to a host who can.

If anyone knows of a good hosting company that has excellent customer service please let me know.

I would also like to take this opportunity to state that I have never, nor will I ever send out spam. I use my email account, as most people would, to either communicate with people that I know or to reply to legitimate queries that I receive either via my contact form or my blogs. I do not even send forwards.