I complained to abuse@blackmesh.com, and got the following reply (pasted below). The medispend.com people could inspect the email headers, and complain to the hosting company of the originating email sender. I emailed blackmesh.com and support@medispend.com and asked for the full headers of one of the spam emails. I know that this is probably futile, but sometimes, I just need to try to stop these people.
Ursula
From blackmesh.com:
This phenomenon is due to a spammer somewhere sending spam to support@medispend.com, and using your address as the "From" address. Since support@medispend.com is a helpdesk, it helpfully replies with ticket-tracking information you can use to follow your request. As you know, of course, "your" request is not *yours*, so this reply just looks like spam to you.
Unfortunately, due to the way that Internet email works, there's not a whole lot that can be done by either you or by medispend.com to stop this sort of bounceback spam. You can read more about the problem at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_%28e-mail%29 . We have strengthened the spam filters on medispend.com to try to protect against this sort of attack, but we cannot unconditionally guarantee that you won't receive further emails if the spammers elect to use your address in future attacks. If you don't have any reason to interact with medispend.com, we'd recommend setting up a filter to automatically delete any messages from medispend.com (though we'd request that you don't additionally mark them as spam, as they are not, per se).
We want to extend our apologies to you for the emails you've received, but hopefully it's now more clear why you received them, and you can appreciate that we were not complicit in your receipt of them. If you have any further questions, however, please don't hesitate to ask for clarification.
On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 12:54 PM, Earnie Boyd earnie@users.sourceforge.netwrote:
Jeff Brown wrote:
On 16 Nov 2011, at 7:25 PM, Marty Landman wrote:
At 11:44 AM 11/16/2011, Ms. Nancy Wichmann wrote:
I got 448. The system owner has apologized. Let's stop now, as this is becoming spam itself.
I agree. There ought'a be a special corollary to Godwin's Law to cover just these types of situations. Like the Law of Meta-Spamming or something. Just thinking out loud here.
Oh, the irony. ;)
I just got a personal email from pinky.goyal22@gmail.com:
"Sincere apologies for my error that caused automated emails to be sent to you from the address pinky@evakoss.com. I was working on a support ticket system for a client and when testing the system I didn't realize that the system would send a support ticket in response to your email I've received and responded to in the past.
I'm very sorry and will take extreme caution so this issue never occurs again."
But I've never communicated with this person in my life.
I'm really battling to imagine an entirely innocent use-case scenario for scraping mailing list archives for email addresses and names.
As I stated before pinky was not the sender of the email. Sure it was the From address but that can be faked. Check the email headers for the real sender and you'll find "millen@iade122lmp01.blackmesh.com" was the sender and not pinky.
-- Earnie
-- https://sites.google.com/site/earnieboyd/
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