Spam email...How do they do it?

[Hightower]

I've just been checking my on-line email client and found that I'm being targeted by about 80 spam mails a day. Obviously these get filtered out before they get downloaded by outlook and thunderbird, but I was surprised by the amount I was being targeted by.

I guess I blame Mrs Hightower for giving out my email address willy nilly but the spam email that has me baffled is one that says it 's from me How's that possible?

Is there anything that I can do to reduce these spams other than change my address or just let the filter do it's job?

[alexm]

Email is transmitted via SMTP, simple mail transfer protocol, with 'simple' being the operative word. It's very easy to spoof mail with any FROM: you like. Typically spammers will send an email TO: person A on their list FROM: person B on their list because if person A doesn't exist it ends up bouncing to person B so it's like killing two birds with one stone. This is called 'backscatter' spam.

The other one is to send it TO: person A, FROM: person A in the hope that their antispam will think "hey they sent it to themselves, it must be ok!".

SMTP hasn't really been changed since it's inception... there are ways and means to make it more secure but this requires buy-in from ALL the ISP's. People think email is like a guaranteed way to transmit information but in reality it's one of the most primitive protocols on the internet today!

Alex

[Bigmuz7]

Use a different web mail system that has spam filtering built in, Ive been with yahoo mail for 5 years or so , which ordinarily I would not rate if you asked me.. but actually its been bloody brilliant .. means changing accounts ofcourse .. but that would cut all your spammers off in one go anyway

To put it in perspective .. I think I get 1 spam mail every 2-3 months and its usually for Viagra I mean I'm gonna run out at this rate ....

[Hightower]

I go though Orange which has a brilliant anti spam filter, I was just surprised by the amount of spam mail my accout gets bombarded with.

I found out because I tried to send myself a message so that I could pick it up on another computer I have running, it was picked out as spam and caught in the filter