Hello to everyone out there in No Man’s Land. I’m in the middle of a brutal war, one that you may have engaged battles with in the past: the war on spam. But today, the enemy has pulled out a secret weapon that is completely decimating me, and could pose a very serious threat.

No, I’m not writing this way to be funny, I’m very serious about what’s going on. It has to do with one of the websites that I maintain, the one for the 17th District PTA. Because its webhost gave up the ghost about two months ago, I’m currently hosting it under the same hosting package as the one for Webmacster87.info, but today it’s apparently been scapegoated into a pretty difficult situation. Here’s a copy of the dispatch that I sent to my webhost just a few minutes ago:

To whom it may concern:

I’m writing concerning a rather serious issue which has come up today concerning one of my domain names. The main domain name for my site is webmacster87.info, however this one is concerning 17thdistrictpta.org which was added on.

Today I have been receiving an abnormally large amount of spam coming to my personal e-mail (webmacster87@gmail.com)–about 1800 in the last twelve hours alone, and still counting. However, all of these were actually “Delivery Status Notification (Failure)” messages that, when I examined them, showed that it appears that some spammer has been sending out spam e-mails with From e-mail addresses that have @17thdistrictpta.org suffixes. Because many of these spam e-mails were sent to invalid addresses, they bounced back, and since the fake From addresses (like “ahplatne_1979@17thdistrictpta.org” and other random things like that) don’t exist, all of those bounce-back things have been sent to my own personal e-mail, since it is the “catch-all” address.

I am concerned that some spammer or group of spammers somewhere is using our domain name fraudulently as a scapegoat from which to send out spam messages, and I am concerned that this could have grave ramifications for the name of the organization that it represents, such as it being blacklisted by e-mail services, or possibly being reported to you or someone else as though I was responsible for those spam messages. I’m also quite concerned about the impact that the amount of bounce-back messages is having on my bandwidth and your servers.

I don’t know if you have the ability to do anything about this issue, but since you are my web host and your servers are the ones being affected by the tremendous amount of bounced-back messages, you would be the best ones to report this issue to. I would appreciate any advice and assistance you could possibly offer on how to deal with this issue so that I am not affected by further ramifications (and can possibly stop the deluge of bounce-backs).

Thanks for any help you can offer.
–Douglas Bell
Webmaster, California 17th District PTA
http://www.17thdistrictpta.org

As you can see, this is very serious, and I’m very scared about what the possible blow-back from this could be, so I could REALLY use any help you could offer. Have you ever had an issue like this? Do you have any ideas of how I can stop this? Please sound off any advice you may have in the comments!!!

Update: Here’s an example of what I’m dealing with, as you can see in Gmail’s spam box, and an example bounced-back e-mail. But it’s not the fact that I’m getting these bounced-back e-mails that I’m worried about, I’m worried about blacklists and people seeing the domain name on these spam e-mails and thinking bad things…

Tags: 17th District PTA, Delivery Status Notification, e-mail, spam, urgent, web host