Wired Emails

Question

We have been getting a lot (like 20 at a time) of emails with xxxxx@myWebsite.com where xxxx is always different names or random combination of letter and my Website is my web site's name. Does anyone know why this is happening and the affects on our web site? Thanks, James

NLSurfMan · Answer

It's probably a brute force spam-run: just send spam to a generated list of addresses... Nice side-effect for the spammer is that for all the existing emailaddresses, he won't receive a bounce (unless a catch-all address is active), so he would also know the valid email addresses.

It's more than annoying... You can ask you mailserver admin to block mail from his IP. Other solution is to close your catch-all account.

jamepc · Answer

Thanks for your reply NLSurfMan

You may be correct, however let me be a little more clear on the problem: The email I get at my email address (MyName@MyDomain.com) is generated from someone filling out our "Information Request" web page. For all the fields, xxxx@mydomain.com is entered.
Example:
City: xxxx@mydomain.com
State: xxxx@mydomain.com
Title: xxxx@mydomain.com
Name: xxxx@mydomain.com Comments: xxxx@mydomain.com

All the above fake email address are the same. A random name is used with my domain at the end. We would get a bunch at a time each one using a different name or set of random letters. Any ideas?
Thanks again

NLSurfMan · Answer

Then it could be pure herassment... There are tools/bots that auto-fill forms and submit them, or directly access the url with parameters (GET-method), depending on the setup of your contact-page. My advice would be to adjust the page so that you have a list of IP's that are blocked from submitting.

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