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there’s a great article at Computerworld on what is called backscatter, bouncback or blowback, a faily new technique used by spammers, and which may be besmirching your good name!

There is even a new blacklist dealing with backscatter called backscatterer.org

Here’s what we suggest you do to deal with this problem:

We DO NOT suggest that you pay for express delisting at backscatterer.org unless you are seeing receivers reject your mail, the use of this DNSBL is quite limited, and even then, Backscatterer.org listings age off after 30 days after the last instance; the solution to this issue is for you to stop the backscatter coming from your network.

The following suggestions will help to address the backscatter issue you now have:

1. IMPORTANT: Make sure you know what the problem is. While this may seem obvious there can be many sources of backscatter in your mail environment and knowing which one to fix will save you a great deal of time. Some common problems are spam or virus filtering happening after messages have already been accepted, MX servers that don’t know who the valid users are on your system, and out of office notifications.

2. Spamcop publishes some very useful suggestions on how to avoid sending backscatter

3. Handle your inbound mail on a different machine than that set up on your outbound certified IP addresses. While it is always best not to send backscatter at all, you can eliminate the affect on your certified IP(s) by sending such traffic from an alternate IP address.

4. Spam Resource has some in-depth information about how to stop backscatter

5. Evaluate how out of office notices and autoresponders are used in your organization. Remember that since a high percentage of mail sent is from forged addresses then it is likely that a relatively high percentage of autoresponses are going to go back to someone who never sent you anything in the first place. Whether this is an acceptable risk to take may depend on the timeliness and the contents of the email being responded to.

Update: It was pointed out that BATV, while a good technique for dealing with  backscatter coming into your system from outside isn’t by itself a tool for mitigating backscatter coming out of your systems.

There is a spam email message going around, we have seen at least ten copies here at Sender Score Certified. SSC clients are advised that this is an illegitimate email, quite possible with a malware component and you should delete it on sight.