[Techtalk] question reference mail programs

[Robert Wichert]

Rasjid Wilcox wrote:
> 
> On Saturday 21 August 2004 22:35, Helen wrote:
> > I recently received an email from someone saying that I was spamming them
> > from my receive only account.  I checked into it a bit further yesterday
> > and found that I had started postfix on my server with my receive only
> > address as the masquerade.  It looks like I may have been spamming people
> > from the server.  I am using Suse 9.0 and I was recently doing and online
> > update and I received an error message for my postfix config as well.  But
> > it said nothing except that it had found a /etc/postfix/main.cf.SuSEconfig
> > .... and was exiting with a warning.
> > Does anyone have any experience with this?
> 
> Are you sure that it was you that was spamming them?  Does the person
> reporting the spamming know enough about how to look into the mail headers
> and work out what IP address the mail was coming from?  There is nowdays a
> link between viruses and spam, and if your 'receive only' address was in
> someone's (Windows) address book and they got a virus, your address may have
> made its way into a spammers collection of addresses to use as a fake return
> address.
> 
> Without knowing much more detail, it is hard to know.  You really need a copy
> of the full message they received, including all headers, to make any
> assessment at all.
> 

Have the person send you the Spam post, _as an attachment_.  Just
forwarding it doesn't seem to preserve the headers but forwarding _as an
attachment_ seems to accomplish this.  You can then look at the sending
IP address and the sending machine name in the header.  These should
help pin down where it came from, and if it came from you.

Robert