Massive Spam on PN Account

The way the PlusNet email addresses are set up, it is easy for spammers to use the format [email protected].

I am seeing a high level of "Returned mail" type emails tonight as an amazing number of webmasters have no clue about the extra traffic that is caused by them bouncing everything back....to the spammers victim.

I've looked on the portal, but there doesn't seem to be any way of filtering everything *except* valid email addresses.

Is there any way this [censored] can be automatically filtered before I download it?

Thanks

Martin

This may help:
http://www.plus.net/support/email/email_security/email_blocking.shtml


(from Tam's previous post - see that thread for more details if you're unsure)


seb

Thanks Seb - I just noticed the second last para after I posted here (honestly!)

I've raised a ticket (asked a question...) so hopefully they'll sort it in a day or so.

These bounced emails have been a pest up until tonight but I started getting a flood hence the gentle panic...

Regards

Martin

Bizarre.

Exactly the same thing has happened on my account this past week as well.

What I ended up doing is setting up a rule in Thunderbird (OE can do the same thing IIRC) so that all emails to "unrecognised" addresses, ie addresses I don't know about on my account, are both deleted from my PC and the server.

It would be a lot more helpful if you could stop the emails being sent in the first place. But, as I understand it, all the spammer does is change the "from address" in the email - which can't be stopped.

Again here the simple answer is to create the mailboxes that you actually need (and don't forget the postmaster@ account and if you have your own domain name, abuse@) and then ask PN to blackhole the catch all account.

If it's not an address you know about and have a mailbox for, it simply evaporates.

I assume this is done via the portal on Plus' website ??

Under email settings, I currently only have a 'default' mailbox.

Do I just add mailboxes for the email addresses I want (to match my settings in Outlook/Thunderbird) and one for postmaster ? And then ask PN to blackhole the default one ?

Yes. Create all the mailboxes for each address you have incoming, and include a postmaster account as that is where PN send their mails to you. If you have a domain name attached to the account, add an abuse@ address as well.
These are all created in the portal.

Once you've tested these and you are happy you've got them, raise a ticket/ask a question (whatever it's called today) and ask for the catch all account to be blackholed.

To raise a ticket - Technical Suport -> Email Setup, Spam, Webmail & News -> Email Security, Spam & Viruses -> Blackhole your email to Stop Spam.

It says this on there - "To only receive email addressed to mailboxes that you have set up and 'blackhole' the rest, you can ask us to set this up for you here. Please note that you must also set up a mailbox called 'postmaster' if you would like us to do this for you. "

So simply ask for your catch all to be blackholed, and then once it's done the PN email server will bounce anything for your domain that doesn't have a mailbox created for it.

Now the only spam you will get is to your actual mailboxes.

If you have many prefixes you use, to save having to set up loads of account details in your mail client (and the time it takes to collect from them all using POP3), you can use one named mail box and then create re-directs for all the prefixes you want to keep (you could also use a combination of the two techniques).

Thanks.

I think I've got them all set up now. Just need to raise the ticket.

Good point.

I've never had anything more than 4 email accounts.