Is Your Business Spamming Unknowingly? – How Your Business May Be Falsely Represented

If you are the recipient of your business or website catch-all address, you may already be aware of some of the desperate attempts and methods spammers utilize to try and push their products. Even then, you may not realize the impact in could potentially have on your business and or image.

The term “Catch-All” is a typical function available for hosted domain email addresses, but may require a little digging through the setup. This enables any mail received by the mail server that does not match up with a defined email address to still be accepted and show up in the specific email account address that you define instead of rejecting it back to the originating sender. This can be very helpful to combat simple typos, or name misspellings that can often occur by the sender so that they can be occasionally reviewed and passed along to the intended person or department.

However, this availability has been taken advantage of for years on end. The bulk email spammers typically have applications that comb the web much like search engine spiders, looking for formatted email addresses, or in this instance, cataloging domain names it comes across.

With this information, they are able to send email from their servers and specify their own “from” address. This is harmful because they have automated the process and insert random domain names and prepend random names or jibberish to the front of it and send out the wonderful Viagra, Cialis, and Cheap Meds Fast spam. Yes, the problem is the recipient of the email will see the spam as coming from your website domain, as if you are the originator actually trying to sell these items.

As an example which i see often, i see bounceback emails in my spam folder all the time where the from address is something like xkdyfs@mindwiremedia.net. I know that email address doesnt exist, and the only reason why I would ever know that this is going on is because if the recipient has an autoresponder, I still get the bounc back in my catch-all email.

You can imagine how potentially damaging this hidden problem could be if by some chance one of your clients or a partner business recieved this type of spam and it appeared to be coming from your business.

This is one of the frustrating things that damages legitimate bulk email marketing to subscribers or prospects. It is deceptive in making your business the “fall guy” for any recourse from the recipient. Whether your domain name gets black listed on their internal servers, or reported to higher organizations to a much broader black list service where you could already be red flagged as a spammer without knowledge of these activities.

So what can you do about it, well not anything really. Not until some more intuitive email and domain verification systems become available. Many of the popular mail services do a request back to the originating ip and try to resolve the email domain address at that server, but it is not flawless.

All in all good spam systems have been doing a lot better job and the emails showing from your domain name typically land in the spam folder regardless which no one goes through and checks that often anyways.