overwhelmed by emails

For the last couple of weeks my email account (BT Web-Mail via their Office 365 and Outlook) has become overwhelmed with up to 2,000 emails a day in blocks of 500 or so at a time mostly, but not exclusively, during the night, saying the recipients address is not recognised. The addressees seem to be to randomly generated believable English sounding names with legitimate Domains.

These must be initiated by something using my email address and all I can do is to manually delete them all each day. I can't see a way to make Outlook block them in the first place, but this is only a Band-Aid and not a real solution.

At the times these emails are being sent, all my home computers are switched off at the mains.

I am reluctant to 'phone BT as I would get even more frustrated trying to explain my predicament to a non-native English speaker in India.

Help...

A spam service is spoofing your address to send emails out and you are getting all of the bounces.

Nothing BT can do about it.

If there is something common in the subject you can filter out then you can create a rule in Outlook but there may not be.

In the end it may be that the only solutions are either to wait and see if it stops or to change your email address.

In reply to a post by G3UZF:

For the last couple of weeks my email account (BT Web-Mail via their Office 365 and Outlook) has become overwhelmed with up to 2,000 emails a day in blocks of 500 or so at a time mostly, but not exclusively, during the night, saying the recipients address is not recognised. The addressees seem to be to randomly generated believable English sounding names with legitimate Domains.

Sounds like someone is faking your address in the FROM: field. It's easily done (trivial) and a right pain the bum. Any decent email software should support some kind of filtering/redirection so I would look at trying to filter according to part of the message. If these are coming from a mail server there should be an error code in the text (550 5.1.1). Either create a 'delete on sight' filter or if you have redirection redirect it to 'No-one'.

FWIW I'm well aware this stuff goes on. I run my own email server and whilst I've not had your problem yet I am on the other end of it. My email server gets hundreds of emails a day addressed to random names at my domain. Luckily my naming convention means they all get rejected at first base. I also get hundreds of attempts to log on to my SMTP server so they can use it to send emails. When you see the server logs you realise that even an innocuous innocent email server is seen as a juicy target these days

Edited by Andrue (Thu 06-Mar-14 11:02:55)

Can you put a filter in place that looks for "recipient not recognised" in the body and direct those to a sperate folder. You could then quickly glance at it, select all and delete.

have you checked for logins to the account or things in the Sent Items to be sure you haven't been hacked ? May be worth a precautionary password change.

Can you create a rule in Hotmail (sorry, Outlook LOL) to delete them on arrival.