I got Joe Jobbed!

published on 2008-04-16 in computing

In case you've never heard of this, getting 'Joe Jobbed' is when a spammer uses your e-mail address as the 'From:' in their spam and you get all the billion bounces. It rendered my Blackberry useless all afternoon, and I thought I'd finally be screwed on this one. Alas, SpamAssassin 3.2.0 and above (I'm running 3.2.4) comes with rules to block this. Unknown to me, most of the bounces were already going to my spam folder, but any that didn't have the spam body were getting to me. I followed the instructions on this page: http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/VBounceRuleset to make sure it was all set up and wouldn't classify bounces from my own server as bad. Then I set up the following procmail rule to put bounces in their own folder that I can review and run stats on:

:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status:.*ANY_BOUNCE_MESSAGE.*
bounces

Done!

More good reading on this: http://www.sitepoint.com/print/sabotage-coping-joe-job

Tags: email spam