this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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Did you know that if a spammer uses your email address as the FROM: address, which is easy to do, all the bounce messages will go to your email address? If the spammer really hates you, they will send (hear-me.social)
submitted 2 days ago by Jerry@hear-me.social to c/cybersecurity@fedia.io
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Did you know that if a spammer uses your email address as the FROM: address, which is easy to do, all the bounce messages will go to your email address? If the spammer really hates you, they will send millions of emails with your FROM: address and you will get a million bounce messages.

Can you stop this or prevent this? No

Why would a mail provider send you a bounce message, knowing you're innocent? Because that's how someone wrote the protocol back then, and nobody changes it or does it differently because ... reasons.

Does the spammer get a bounce message? Nope, not one.

Does the SMTP sending account owner whose credentials were stolen be notified about bounces so they can stop the spam? Nope.

Just millions of emails sent every day to poor schlameels who have no idea why they are getting them and who can't do anything about them.

The more I learn about the email protocols, the more I realize how terrible the design is.

#emailsecurity #spoofing #cybersecurity #spam

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[โ€“] superkret@feddit.org 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Is the recipient server drops or quarantines spam instead of rejecting it (which is standard best practice), the sending server will never know, and won't send a message back to the sender.

[โ€“] Jerry@feddit.online 1 points 1 day ago

DMARC has only 3 options. Ignore, reject or quarantine. There is no "drop" instead of "reject". And anything other than an "ignore" will cause a reject from the receiving server back to the sending server who will then inform the FROM address that the email was not delivered.