Knowledgebase & FAQs

Spam messages appear to be coming from my address. How do I stop them?

On some occasions if you receive a spam email you may find that it appears to have been sent from your email address, or that of someone else on your domain. Alternatively someone may report that they received a spam message that said it came from you, even though you know you didn't send it.

In most cases this is caused by someone external sending out spam messages, and for that particular message choosing your email address to be listed as the from address.

Unfortunately due to the way that email works there is no way to prevent this. It is an issue for all email systems, not just ours, and is due to the fact that there is no mechanism to authenticate the sender of a message, and thus prove they are who they say they are. If you know what you're doing you can send an email pretending to be anyone you want.

There are many reasons for spammers doing this, the main three being :
1) By using someone else's address any bounce messages won't go back to the spammer.

2) It's harder to track down the spammer.

3) Since many people have anti-spam rules set to allow messages from their own domain, sending from the same domain as they're trying to send to increases the chance of it being delivered.

If you don't already have our Screening Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam service, please speak to us about this service as it can help with many spam issues, subject to some of the limitations outlined above.

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