Wagging the Dog(Bark)
sniffing around the Internet

If you are anything like the rest of us you feel like somebody has hijacked your email account, or somehow broken into your computer and started sending spam to the whole word. You look in your inbox and you have 100 “mailer deliver system” errors or the dreaded “Mailer-Daemon” messages. If this sounds anything like you please keep reading and we’ll offer an explanation that will put your mind at ease.

Well the good news here is that nobody has actually managed to hack into your account. Since we generate the usernames at random, and hopefully you have a password that isn’t “password” you should be well protected from that sort of thing. However, one thing that you (or we) cannot protect yourself from is some avid spammer who has decided to put your email address in as the “From” or, even more annoying, the “reply-to” address field.

Basically either way when they spam folks email to an invalid email addresses, you will be the unfortunate recipient of those bounce messages that will clutter your inbox. Though this is very frustrating there is light at the end of the tunnel. They haven’t stolen your account, they can’t read your emails, and the chances of someone you know actually getting one of those spams from you is about the same as Harry or I not having at least one caffeinated beverage in an 8 hour day (VERY VERY slim).

To get rid of them: If you mark theses as junk, your legitimate bounce messages may be marked as junk as well, and generally we want to know if a message we send fails, so you don’t want to take that approach. In most situations the best thing you can do it simply delete the messages and hope they find another victim tomorrow.

We know it’s a constant battle with spammers, but as long as email is a free way for us all to communicate there will always be people who take advantage of that for financial gain. We’d love to see a spam free world, and please know we are doing all we can to ensure that you get the emails you want, and that at least 90% of the ones you don’t want will never make it to your inbox.

Please email us at info@dogbark.com if you have any further questions.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 9:48 am and is filed under Issues and Solutions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.