Preamble: As this my first post of the year – Happy New Year<\/strong><\/p>\n

Recently someone has been sending spam and pretending it is from me (from beginstahome.com to be exact). A quick Google<\/a> of the term \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c5\u201cemail spoofing<\/a>\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac? 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 \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c5\u201cFrom\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac? and\/or \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c5\u201cReply-To\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac? section of their email sending application. It really is that simple and it allows spammers to send mail without revealing where it originated from.<\/p>\n

\u00c3\u201a\u00c2 <\/p>\n

For a person whose email has been spoofed there are two main reasons why this is annoying.<\/p>\n

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\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s credit rating.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>[dot]com, [at]aol<\/a>[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\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u201e\u00a2s default email account.<\/p>\n

This is exactly the situation I found myself in towards the end of last year and I emailed my web hosting company<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n

Kui,
\nYou 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.<\/p>\n

Best Regards,<\/p>\n

Naeem
\nCustomer Service Team
\nStudentWebHosting
\nLow Cost Web Hosting Solutions<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, while I am not an expert in computer related matters I do however live by the motto \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c5\u201cGoogle<\/a> and Wikipedia<\/a> are your friends.\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac?<\/em> Furthermore, my fianc\u00c3\u0192\u00c2\u00a9 has a PhD in Computer Science so it is fair to say that I knows people who knows their stuff.<\/em> More importantly (thanks to my “friends” and my fianc\u00c3\u0192\u00c2\u00a9) I know that my contact form can not be held responsible for email spoofing.<\/p>\n

I fully appreciate that email spoofing is baffling business everywhere. I don\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00e2\u201e\u00a2t 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.<\/p>\n

Can you imagine the furore it would cause if the people at Blogger<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

If anyone knows of a good hosting company that has excellent customer service please let me know.<\/p>\n

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.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac\u00c5\u201cemail spoofing\u00c3\u00a2\u00e2\u201a\u00ac? suggests that this problem is widespread and unfortunately it does not take much to spoof an address. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,14,2,12],"tags":[32,31,97,33,34,96,35],"class_list":{"0":"post-258","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-blogsphere","7":"category-my-junk","8":"category-site-news","9":"category-uk","10":"tag-blogging","11":"tag-blogs","12":"tag-blogsphere","13":"tag-css","14":"tag-html","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-wordpress","17":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Y7Vr-4a","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beginsathome.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beginsathome.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beginsathome.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beginsathome.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beginsathome.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beginsathome.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beginsathome.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beginsathome.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beginsathome.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}