Why am I receiving non-related bounce messages in my mailbox?

Faking email headers, by viruses or spammers, is called Email Spoofing and is common in the distribution of viruses and spam mail via the internet.

If your domain name was used in email spoofing, any failed deliveries will generate bounce messages back to your email addresses. Email spoofing is usually the cause when you receive bounce messages from email addresses you have not sent email to.

Virus Generated emails

Some viruses can search the files of an infected computer for email addresses. The virus then sends itself as an attachment to the email addresses it finds on the infected computer with your email address as the sender or ‘From’ address.

Please ensure that you protect your computers and network with good anti-virus software.

Spam generated emails

Spammers do not use their own email addresses to send spam. Instead, they search the internet for domain names and then fake the ‘From’ and ‘Reply-to’ fields in their spam email headers, by using addresses belonging to random domain names.

As there is nothing that prevents a virus or a spammer from using a false (spoofed) email address when sending mail, there is no way to prevent all bounce messages.

There are, however, some methods that can be used to help reduce the amount of bounce messages received, should your email account be spoofed by a spammer:

• Note: The above are just some of the methods you can use to help reduce the amount of bounce-back messages received. It is unfortunately not possible to prevent all bounce-back messages due to the nature of email systems