My domain is being abused by spammers

Hiya, I just checked my domain hosting and there is 30GB of email which is mainly just email returned to sender :-O

Basically I only use info AT jbcomputersolutions.blah and all of the emails look like they were sent from someloadofcrap AT jbcomputersolutions. So basically I wondered a few things:

1) Can I check if my domain name is blacklisted easily? or does it not work like that, do only mail servers (mine is Wanadoo) get blacklisted?
2) How can I encode any email addresses that I put on my erbsite so that they are not picked up by bots or whatever? Forms can be abused too right? How can they be locked down?
3) If the spammer knows my domain and just uses whatever prefix, then I'm stuffed right? Or can I do something with a wildcard MX or SPF? (I don't really know what the hell those things are I just heard about them a little bit).

Any help is much appreciated. Thanx!!!

Your domain hosting company should be able to block all of those 'someloadofcrap' emails from your email servers so that only the legit address 'info' accepts mail. Or there may be an option to disable it on their control panel etc.

Neither. GEnerally only open relays get blacklisted. You can look it up here.

It depends on what kind of form you're using. One that employs server-side technology like CGI, Java Servlets or PHP can be written in such a way as to not expose the e-mail address.

Yeah, pretty much. Just setup your domain to bounce all mails with bollocks addresses.

I'm with powweb and for a laugh I decided to turn off the bounce feature for my domain. I picked an email addrss ' spamme@...' as the catchall for any email sent to my domain. Within a day I had received thousands of email addressed to every possible name, number, object @kamikazekrow.com.

An email sent to BillGates@... was even in my catch all addy.

I'm pretty sure that they just send a torrent of spam to every conceivable name or email at you domain with the hope that one will not bounce, meaning they found a legit email address that you have.

Real Crazy stuff if you ask me.

This happened to me recently, you can't do shit about it apart from set up a ::blackhole:: on your mailserver - you won't get blacklisted as it's done on the sender IP and not on the email domain.

hmm some good advice there. So I'll have to live with it and setup my server to bounce stupid email addresses...

Just bounce everything not sent to an email address that exists.

I don't bother bouncing email back. I've set mine up to just delete any email not going to a configured email account. I can't he bothered sifting through 99.9% of spam just in case 1 email may of been sent to an incorrect address.

For number 2. I've used two differents methods that both worked fine (no spam on either address so far).

One was using a form that only contains the first part of the mail (what's before @). Dreamhost supports posting the result to an address at the domain the form is on.

The other was using @ instead of @ and . instead of . and so on. AND using a JavaScript that builds the address from different parts. Basically so that there is no e-mail address in the html/php code of your page. JavaScripts are run by the browser, so the resulting e-mail address is only created in the browser of the end user. Most spiders scouring the web for mail addresses don't run JavaScripts and probably don't understand @ either.

Ah I heard of the encoding method. Wonder if it works without the Java script. Will have to try...

great I've just set unrouted mail to go to :blackhole:, cool!

I was wondering how my business partner had started to get spam in her e-mail account when we've never listed her e-mail address anywhere on the net... Now I know how...

Some days ago people told me I'm paranoid and I should wear a tinfoil hat when I mentioned the need to fight these problems.

I like the idea of building it with javascript, but IE7 complains it's wee cotton socks off at it (wee you get that info bar and have to click "Allow Blocked Content"). Shame, nice idea otherwise.

>.< I've just started getting this too, 200 emails in one day.

I can't get the filter to work on Orange mail though, when I click to add a filter it just opens my settings page again.