Kenninghall Creations

I used to have a default e-mail box setup to receive e-mail sent to my domain that didn’t correspond to an actual e-mail address in my hosting account. In theory it’s a way of making sure you get e-mails even if the sender misspells something other than the domain. Some use a default mailbox so they can deliberately use different e-mail addresses for specific recipients as a way to figure out who passes on those addresses to third parties. Well, after having this for a few months, it is pretty obvious it is not worth doing. Out of of about 2500 e-mails received, only 2 were legitimate, 900 were spam sent to my domain, and the rest were “backscatter” after some spammer used my domain to spoof sender addresses. What is backscatter? Here’s the definition from Wikipedia:

Backscatter of email spam
The term “backscatter” is also used to describe a side-effect of email spam, viruses and worms. In this context, an alternate, more distinguishing term “outscatter” is also used, since the traffic isn’t directed to the original destination, but to a third party instead. Since a 2002 Klez variant[1], a large proportion of malignant email is sent with a forged sender address, but some mail servers do not take this into account. They generate bounce messages for spam or viruses – which of course go to an innocent party.

Conclusion – I won’t be using a default mailbox for kenninghall.com anymore.