Have you been out today?

I got/get the same problem. Sadly haven't yet figured out anything to do about it. It does seem to get less over time... nor does it seem to do much harm other than be tiresome.

 

Yes, I've had similar, though not so intense, spells of such annoyance before - maybe 10-20 mails per hour rather than 100 - and they've always gone away in time. I assume the spammer just periodically moves on to using some other mug's domain. But, yes, tiresome in the meantime and I'm just a little wary that I might miss the odd false positive in among the hundreds of genuinely spammy messages and accidentally delete something important.

Anyway, my webhost has sent me (slightly complicated-looking) advice on diverting it all away before it reaches my inbox so I might have a go at implementing that later.

 

I refer the gentleman...

http://peteashton.com/2006/10/there_are_no_curse_words_strong_enough/

In the long term I have a separate folder where anything NOT addressed to pete@mydomain automatically goes. This catches mailing lists and stuff where I'm in the bcc but when a spam-backwash occurs it keeps my inbox mostly free and I can delete with impunity. (If I miss a mass mailing in that hour or two it's no biggie).

Good news is it seems to come and go with significant gaps inbetween. Not had one for months now (touches wood..)

hope that helps a bit.

 

kill the 'catch all' mailbox that you probably have set up to capture 'any' address@yerdomain as the bounce backs will be originating from randomly generated addresses @yerdomain & thus returning to said random addresses - which the catchall duly collects.

this will allow the mailserver that is collecting mail for yerdomain happily ignore all these legitimately created bounce messages from the illegitimate use of your domain

 

All seems to have pretty much abated before I got round to taking any action, thankfully. Thanks for all the advice though.