SPAM - A Different Kind of Identity Theft?

bmooney28 asks: "After maintaining a single permanent email address through 8 years and five ISP's (via a forwarding service), I lost it all in a day. My first sign of trouble came when I found a message undeliverable email in my inbox containing hundreds of failed email addresses. Apparently, my email address had been pasted as the return address in a mass mailing similar to this one sent to hundreds of random recipients. This process repeated a few times over the next day or so, effectively blacklisting my email address on various master lists and adding my address to thousands of random address books (virus magnets). In the past, I have had a great deal of luck fighting off SPAM and other unwanted email via throwaway email addresses and preemptive email filtering. Now, the email address that I use to communicate with friends, former students, and coworkers around the world is useless. Have any of you ever found yourself in a similar situation? Are there any legal steps that I could take against this company?"

Comments

Come and si the violence inherit in teh system!

[Xunker]

While not and answer to your question, I feel this incident exposes a major problem with the way many MTAs are architected.

I cannot send mail to AOL users. Why? Because I'm in their spam filter. Why? Because of Kleez. AS you may know, it extracts address from your IE cache and sends mail using one of those addresses it find. Well, mine was used a bunch of times to send the virus to AOLers.

AOLs mail server didn't bother to read the headers -- instead, it does wqhat no server should do, trust the "From:" header. Had their MTA parsed the "Received By" logs, it would find that it wasn't sent by me. Instead, whoever wrote it took the easy way out and decided to always believe the From: header and as such I'm now unable to send mail to AOL.

Not like I mind.