Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages.

If you now have a domain name, you will most likely recieved more spam. Spammers will find your domain (just like your customers would Google), and then send spam to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

In addition, Spammers can use your domain name to disguise their spam. This type of abuse happens frequently to many domain name owners, since spammers rarely use their own domain names in SPAM and viruses select addresses randomly from other people's address books.

Forging is when spammers use your domain name as a reply addresses to send out their spam (like This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ).

Anyone with Outlook or any other email program can forge whatever address they want in the FROM field of an email, regardless of whether they own the domain name in the address, regardless of whether they have permission to use it, and regardless of whether the domain name even exists or is valid. There is nothing that the rightful owner of a domain name can do to stop people from sending out email with the worng address in the FROM field.

The most annoying part of having someone forge your email address for SPAM is the nondelivery and bounce notifications you will recieve because some of the spammed emails used by teh spammers will not exist - and the Postmaster will think it came from your address. You will recieved hundreds of emails from Postmaster to say that the male delivery was unsuccessful. This is an automated reply from a computer. 

There are a couple of things we advise which may help though in reducing the amount of returned messages you receive as a result of this SPAM being sent with your email address as the forged FROM address -

• Manually Delete (recommended) -  The bounce back emails usually only continue for a couple of days. During this period, you can quickly sort your email by sender - and delete all Postmaster emails in one clump. Althought this will go on for a couple of days, rest assured, it will eventually die down (untill the next time).
• Disable Default Address - Ask to Disable the catch all email address for you domain. By disabling your catch all email address, it means that any messages sent to an email address that you have not specifically setup as an email account will be rejected. The downside of this is if a customer or friend mistypes your real email, you will not get it - and risk loosing important sales.
• Block Postmaster Emails - you can block the postmaster emails. This is not recommended because you will not see any bouncebacks yourself if you mistype an email.

We recommned that you do not reply to any of these emails. Most of these emails will autogenerated. As for angry reciepnts of the forged email, its best that they get advice from their IT people (who should be able to tell that the email was forged and not from you). Engaging in correspondence to angry recipients may get you in a debate on an issue that is not in your control.

Although this type of activity can be extremely annoying you do not need to worry about being blacklisted by the anti-SPAM databases. None of the major anti-SPAM databases block a server based on the FROM address of the SPAM message as they are well aware that the FROM address can be forged and that it is a common tactic used by spammers.