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lucb1e • yesterday at 9:10 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

The backscatter can be annoying though. I had none for over 10 years either but it's picking up now to perhaps a few per month. Looking around how to prevent it, apparently "backscatter" is an established term for the phenomenon that you can't fix, where you receive rejected spam emails, and they're often sent from randomly generated prefixes @ your domain (no matter that you have SPF/DKIM/etc. set up). My partner also gets waves of autoreplies, like "your support ticket will be handled soon" and "I'm out of office until ...", where someone seems to have used their domain with a random prefix no apparent reason

The solution is probably to tell the senders that they're effectively sending out spam / doing a variant of open relaying by emailing the spoofed address, but even internet-savvy institutions like an IP address assigning organization (RIPE) sends me backscatter so I don't have a ton of hope


Replies

martin- • today at 9:18 AM

I finally gave up on using catch-all, and now only allow e-mail to addresses @mydomain.com that follow a certain pattern. If someone were to specifically target me and look closer at all the addresses I use, they would quickly figure out the pattern, but I see no reason why a spammer would do that.