First, let me get all the swearing out of the way up front. @&%^ #$%#^&!

Someone has started sending out mass spammings using one of my domain names as the return address. I don't know how many emails have been sent out using that domain, but it has to be in the million range I am sure. 

It all started when over the Christmas holidays, I started receiving email bounce backs from people I've never sent an email to. Several were of the "I am not in the office this week" variety, but now tons are in the "access denied" variety. All told, I bet I've received around 1000 email bounce backs.

Lucklily my junk email filter caught most of them, but its still a pain to log into Gmail and see 400+ emails in your spam folder. I usually receive 50 per day, but 400 was a new record.

SPAM is such an ugly and useless thing. It's unbelievable to me that in 2008, there is not an easy technical solution to fix it. The world has closed off most of the open email relay servers, why not go after all of them? And why not implement a protocol that provides and absolute and unhackable trace to the actual source of the email. Once an email server has been identified that sends out thousands of spam messages a day, shut it down. The ISP can turn off the switch. Unplug it. Find and fix these holes in our email infrastructure.

On my Marketing Weblog, I say personal email is dead. This is one big reason email is dead.