Of course the spam isn’t really coming from you. It is just made to look as if it comes from you. If you understand how to read email headers you can trace it back to somewhere else (though not to the spammer).

The biggest problem with it is that most people don’t understand how easy email address spoofing is. Once every month or two I get an angry email from someone who thinks I have sent them spam.

Dave is qiute correct to say that adding an SPF record will help, and that you should not try to do it yourself. It isn’t easy, and it is dangerous. I’ve looked at the instructions, and I’m not going anywhere near it. And I’m someone who run her own web sites and has been programming computers for 30 years.

The other problem with SPF is that it isn’t widely supported. Big corporations will probably check incoming email against your SPF record to see if it is genuine, but many people won’t, and in consequence will still get spam “from” you.

In a nutshell, it is a mess.

M xox

Am speaking to my webmaster forthwith…

That would be the extent of my IT knowledge.

The one thing that can be done that is partially (but only partially) successful is to add something called an SPF record to the glendalarke.com domain name configuration, this is something that should probably be done by an IT professional. Ask me via email if you need more information.

First, you can check that any forms on your website that generates email are secure and that they haven’t been hijacked by spammers — if your web guy doesn’t know what to look for shout out, I think I have an article tucked away or Arthur or Andrew could take a look for you if your site is in either PHP or ColdFusion. It probably hasn’t happened but under those circumstances you want to be sure as if they’re using your bandwidth it could end up costing you money.

The second deals with the ‘return to sender’ being dumped in YOUR inbox. That sounds like you have a ‘catch all’ applied to one (or more) email addresses on your domain. Take a look in the control panel for your email section with your website host. Untick the catch-all box. That way you’ll only receive things sent to a valid email account rather than anything sent to @glendalarke.com.

Good luck!

I would stop worrying. If anyone emails and complains (which happened to me a couple of years ago) I would explain that the use of your email address is without your consent and you don’t know who is doing it.