Failure Notice
SHA Newsletter: Vol 2. No. 1
Have you ever received a failure notice in your email for a message you
didn’t send? If so, join the club!
A failure notice is an automated message sent by email servers when an
email message cannot be delivered. They are intended to let you know that
a message you sent never reached its destination. The people who run email
servers set up this feature when they set up the server. Different servers
can have different policies about failure notices, and the text of the
failure notice can be serious or light-hearted. Some email servers might
never send failure notices but most do.
Why notices get sent
Email messages move through the Internet on a “store and forward”
basis. Email travels from server to server. At each stop, the message
is generally saved in a file (a mail queue) until the server can figure
out the appropriate next hop. There are no guarantees, though. A link
to a particular destination server might be down, a server might not be
running anymore, or the message might be refused because of an error.
Mail servers are patient, and usually will try again over several hours
or even days. But eventually, the server will give up if the message can’t
go through. When that happens, a failure notice gets generated and returned
to the sender.
Why notices arrive for mail you never sent
The more you use your email address, the more public it becomes. Eventually
the address gets found by spammers who decide to use your address as the
sending address for their nastygrams. They can do this because with conventional
Internet mail the “sent-from” address you see is just a placeholder.
The message can actually come from anywhere. Of course, when I send a
legitimate message, I want to make sure the sent-from address is correct
– but if the address is wrong, the message will still get through.
Deliberately using the wrong address is known as address spoofing.
For spammers, this loophole provides an extra benefit: they can hide
behind a spoofed address. They’ll never be bothered by any failure
notices, because those go to the spoofed address. The spammer doesn’t
care about the errors because he’s busy sending millions of messages
out randomly.
Why spoofing is a problem
Spoofing causes trouble on a number of fronts:
• It’s deceitful. If you automatically add unexpected addresses to your blocked senders list, you can end up adding addresses for innocent users. Since they didn’t send you the unwanted mail, blocking them won’t stop spam.
• It damages reputations. When you receive unsolicited messages, bear in mind that the person who “sent” you the mail probably had nothing to do with it. Someone else has spoofed the address.
• It wastes network resources. All the messages and failure notices
fly around the Internet going to the wrong people.
It happens to us, too
We use a special email address for customer requests. It’s included
in every newsletter so you can reach us. Since that address is in our
messages and on our Web site, it’s a target for spammers.
You can contact us at request@stoneyhillassociates.com. This gets you to a computer program known as an autoresponder. That program will send you an immediate acknowledgement and will forward the message to the right person on our end. The autoresponder helps us to get to you faster than we otherwise could. We use other email addresses when we work with specific clients.
We do send our newsletter from this address. If you reply to a newsletter, we want you to reach us.
You might get unsolicited mail that appears to come from this address.
If you do, please remember that we didn’t send it to you – someone
has probably spoofed our request address because it is readily available.
Why email works this way
Years ago, when the Internet mail protocols were established, no one worried
about unsolicited mail. Email users knew one another as friends and colleagues.
As it turns out, solving this problem, technically known as mail authentication,
is fairly complicated. All email users worldwide would have to change
in order to permanently stop it. That’s surely not going to happen.
What you can do about it
Be courteous in using email. Follow the suggestions we’ve sent, and
other tips for etiquette in email. Don’t forward email messages indiscriminately.
Consider using different addresses for public and private messages.
When you use an email address on your Web site, blog, or message board; block the spammers. Instead of
you@yourisp.com
try something like this:
you (at) your<NO SPAM, PLEASE>isp.com
When your friends see this, they’ll know how to remove the extra text and recover your address. But the programs spammers use to harvest addresses have a hard time doing the same.
Please note: Any trademarks and trade names of others mentioned in this message are the property of their owners, and not Stoney Hill Associates, LLC. We respect the intellectual property of others. The information provided is believed to be reliable, but we cannot guarantee that the procedures and information given here will work correctly for your specific situation.
If you would like help with a computer or software problem you face, contact us. Send an email to request@stoneyhillassociates.com.
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© 2005 Stoney Hill Associates, LLC
