Attack of the mangy network terrorist scum

I hate spammers. They completely ruined one Christmas for me, and their continuing exploits are at least annoying, at most a waste of time. In the jurgen dot ca digital empire, I’ve pretty much taken care of the dreaded “comment spam” by including that “type this number” thing. Personal email is handled relatively well by Apple Mail.app, with its built-in Baysean spam filter. It’s been correctly sorting hundreds of spam emails every day.

But now, I have a problem.

First, for my less-technical readers, a short geek lesson. Just like in real post, the return address on a piece of email does not have to be your own. You can put anything you want in there. Your address, a mate’s address, even Bill Gates’ address. Some ISPs limit the range of addresses they will send from to ones that look like customers of theirs, but most of the time, email can look like it’s coming from anyone.

Spammers love this. They can put any email address they want to in the “From” field, and whenever the spam bounces back to them, they don’t get the bounce, but the person whose email address is in the “From” field gets the bounce.

Right now, that person is me; some mangy network terrorist scumbag is using my email address as a “From” address. I’m sure this isn’t personal: some program saw a link somewhere to my site and is using that domain name as a From address.

I’m now getting a couple hundred bounces every day from email that I haven’t sent.

Two things are happening as a result of this:

# When someone gets a piece of spam, seemingly from jurgen.ca, they might come to the site and see my well crafted but perhaps overly grey site and think nasty things about me.

# I’m getting way more crap email that the spam filter isn’t capable of dealing with properly. I can’t sent all bounces to the spam folder, because I need to know if genuine email has not gone through.

I can’t really solve the first one, and that’s fine. I’m sure it won’t be the first time people have thought bad things about me, and it doesn’t bother me that much. However, problem number two is more of a concern. I suppose I could work up some filters to catch most of the reverse-spam (“maps”?), but it doesn’t really solve the problem, and seems like a bit of a hack. Any geeks out there with suggestions?