SPAMming myself

quantumottle

New Member
I've heard of this problem before, but unfortunately, it's never happened to me until moving to KnownHost last month. Not sure how or why, but I'm getting dozens of spam e-mail per day with the return address being my own personal e-mail account. I'm getting almost 100 SPAM messages per day, but only a handful (so far) that appear to be from me.

I'm very concerned I will end up being blacklisted on other sites....

Please share your advice on how to
A) decrease the amount of SPAM I'm getting and
B) prevent my own e-mail address (and domain) from being blacklisted for SPAM I'm not sending.

I've enabled SpamAssasin in cPanel with a score of 4, and BoxTrapper. I am catching the SPAM in Boxtrapper, but after a month or so I am exhausted deleting, blacklisting, ignoring SPAM.

Please Help!
 
Thanks for the info Dave,
Yes, I turned on DKIM and SPF the first day with my new VPS. I thought they were designed to prevent spam spoofed from your own address, no?
 
I'm not sure how they work would need to do a little research or maybe someone will chime in.
At one time years ago I had thousands of bounce backs flooding my inbox I was being what was call "Joe Jobed" someone using my email address to send crap mail, I final had to shut down the email address.

Have you checked your site to see if it has been compromised maybe a mail form?
 
Honestly, I don't yet know how to check if I've been compromised. I've been on VPS all of 6 weeks after too many years of shared hosting.
 
Are the emails bounce backs or are they really coming from you, to you to see if they really coming from you check the email headers.
 
The spam e-mail are bounce backs, the from address on the full headers are another domain.

Also, I notice that SpamAssassin and/or Account Level Filtering are not assigning a spam score to the e-mail. The Spam Status is "NO" with no score.
 
@quantumottle : Pls check the email header,

Is it one like this ?

X-Spam-Status: No, score=
X-Spam-Score:
X-Spam-Bar:
X-Ham-Report:
X-Spam-Flag: NO

or like this ?

X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9
X-Spam-Score: -18
X-Spam-Bar: -
X-Ham-Report: Spam detection software, running on the system "yourvps", has..

If the mail header is one like the first one, then Spam Assassin is not working properly, you may request KH support to assist.

As Dave mentioned above, I would turn off BoxTrapper, which will inturn reduce number of bounced backed emails. BoxTrapper sends out verification email back to the sender, and if the sender address is spoofed, then you are sending out emails to unintended recipients.

Once your SpamAssassin start to assign score (as mentioned above), create an email account called spam or similar and create a filter to route email which has got spam score of 4 to that email account.. Once in a while have a look into that email account for any genuine email.. adjust score in filter as required based on this. And you may empty the spam mail account as and when required.
 
It is like the first example. If Spam Assassin isn't working properly that would explain why the amount of spam I'm getting has increased since coming to KnownHost.

Thanks for the helpful replies!
 
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