Spam being generated from my fastmail userID..

[wall]

The secondary problem first. When I report this problem to fastmail.fm admins, I get a loopback message (undeliverable) to any userid@fastmail.fm address I email to, so I'm resorting to the forums.

The main problem is a spammer seems to have auto-generated my userID in fastmail (I keep it ultra-secret, no webpages, etc.) so spam is being sent out under my Username.

Please contact me via email if you can.

Thanks,

- Matt

[petergh]

This sounds to me like a "Joe Job", against which little can be done, unfortunately. For more information, please search for "Joe Job" on this forum or on Google.

[JohnnyUtah]

same thing is happening to me! Just started within the last couple of days.

[Suresh]

Hello

A message quote from Rob from this thread http://www.emaildiscussions.com/...b&pagenumber=1

FastMail is currently being hit by a "joe-job". This is where spammers
send out email, but forge it to make it look like the sender was from a
FastMail address. Since many of the addresses they are sending to are
invalid, the other system is bouncing the email back to the "sender",
which it thinks in this case is a FastMail address. It is like someone
sending out envelopes in the mail where they write your address on the
back--the recipient is lead to believe it is from you, but in fact you
had nothing to do with it.

Unfortunately, because we are in no way associated with the origin of
the spam, we can't directly stop the sending of the original emails.
However, most "joe-job" runs only last a day or two, so hopefully
it will stop shortly.

If you have a Full or Enhanced account, setting up the advanced spam
filter (Options -> Account Preferences) should help.

The way spammers pick forged "From" addresses is to simply randomly
choose from a long list. They take their list of email addresses to send
to, which they've purchased from a list vendor, strip off everything
after the '@', and that gives them a semi-random list of usernames.
Then, they append a domain from their joe-job target list--in this case
a FastMail.FM domain. In this way they get a whole bunch of addresses,
most of which don't even exist, but a bunch of which will so happen to
be valid.

Because of the way fastmail currently works, email addresses to
yourusername@<any-fastmail-domain> will currently be delivered to your
account, even although you may not have registered an address in this
particular domain. This feature will be changed in a couple of months to
reduce the types of problems that you are experiencing.

More information on "joe-job" is here: http://www.cotse.com/11022000.html

More information on how email headers can be forged:
http://www.fastmail.fm/docs/faqpart...html#EmailForge
http://www.rahul.net/falk/mailtrack.html

Sorry for any inconvenience that this is causing.

Rob

Hope this helps

[jolycu]

I'm a victim of this "joe job" right now and have been for the last 4 days. So far I've gotten about 6-7 emails bounced back to me. Not too many, but I'm wondering how many are actually being received in legitimate mailboxes and those people think it is coming from me! I'm concerned that my account may be blocked by Fastmail if someone reports to them that spam is coming from "my" address. Actually, everything that's come back to me is addressed in the Fastmail.fm domain which I don't use. (I'll sure be glad when they split the domains! ) So, what I am wondering is, should I report to Fastmail admin that I am a victim of the notorious joe job in case someone does make a report?

[Suresh]

Fastmail admin's would easily be able to identify whether this is a Joe Job or not. It's pretty easy to get that information from the headers of emails that people report as Spam.

I don't think you should be too worried about it.

The problem stems from the very trusting nature of email when it was first developed. To quote from the FM FAQ

So why is this all the case? It's basically to do with the early days of the Internet, where everything was just between a few trusted university computers. No one had a need or reason to forge email headers, because people really did just want to email each other. These days of course, there are lots of people trying to push advertising on you, and they don't want their original address to be identified.

[kinetic]

Every email that originates from fm has the userid encoded in the header which cannot be forged. Hence you have no reason to worry about your account being closed due to joe jobs on your id.

[jolycu]

Thanks Suresh and kinetic. I kind of thought that was how it was but it's nice to have confirmation!