"Is there any legal redress for such abuse?"

Man, if there was, the courts would not have time for anything else. I think everyone has gone or will go through this. Not much you can do.

Dave T2

The header says "X-Originating-Email: [jay at gooddogproductions dot com]" *
"X-Sender: jay at gooddogproductions dot com" *

*altered from original

I've had the same thing happen to me. It lasted for about a month (I notified my email host) and then I haven't had that problem since. I found out that it was happening when I was getting return emails that I never sent to addresses that did not exist. Most of them were sent to people over seas. At least that is how it appeared.

I asked the same question and was basically told there is nothing you can do (that is what I read too when I googled this).

j razz

You can build a filter in most mail readers that will let you send incoming email to a different folder, or to the trash folder. I have one rule in my filters that sends anything to me and from me to the trash.

Changing the header display addresses is relatively easy. I wouldn't worry about clogging the courts because to sue you have to have pretty good evidence who the actual sender is, that they have malicious intent and that they did cause you harm.

Pretty tall bar to reach for mere annoyance.

any address can be spoofed. but it could also be because you DID send it, a bug sent it using your machine. Can easily happen if you use outlook (or similar programmed apps).

Jay,
If you start getting a string of never ending "return to sender"or "address undeliverable" e-mails you may have to change your e-mail address.

I use Internet Explorer, but it is severely crippled (no I-Frames, Scripts, Active-X, etc). For the doo-dads I use either Firefox or Opera (which I am using right now) because unlike Microsoft browsers and e-mail clients they are not integrated into the OS at the expense of the user's security and the corporate benefit of Microsoft.
I never use Outlook (Currently Thunderbird and before that Eudora).

I also use Mailwasher to pre-screen and read the e-mails on the server and if spam is on there or if Mailwasher did not correctly identify spam as spam I flag it as spam and Bounce-Delete the e-mail. The spam will be reduced or eliminated that way to a great extent because it never made it to it's destination. Takes awhile for that to happen.

For your main ISP account you have a master user account and the ability to create sub-accounts. If you wisely used a sub-account you can simply stop using it or close it out (if none of the above work), and create another sub-account to use.

John

The email standards in current use are so lax that anyone can produce an email with almost any identifcation. Heck, most email programs that run on your PC have a spot for you to enter your email address for the outgoing headers and while it's expected that you enter your email address there, you can type zippy@pinhead.moo if you want to. This is what will show up as the "From: " address on recipient's screens when you send email to them and they would have no way of knowing it's not valid. Anyone else can type YOUR email address there too. Email as we currently know it is based entirely on human trust, not on technical certification. That's the way it is and there's not much that can be done about it without entirely replacing email from scratch with something that is incompatible with current systems and expecting everyone in the world to all switch over simultaneously ... ie. never.

Automated emailing programs (i've written thousands of them over the years) depend completely on manually setting up a from address, and once again *anything* can be put in that field. We generally use either a guaranteed non-existent address or one that directs to an auto-trashing inbox.

Spammers and scammers will keep a list of other people's email addresses or even random fake addresses and use those in the From: and Reply-to: fields so that when their spams/scams bounce they go elsewhere instead of back to them. It also helps hide who they are so they avoid complaints and legal actions.

What can you do about it? Not much. Ignoring it is probably your best and sanest option. Unless you get caught in a case where there are hundreds of thousands of bounces coming back at you it's pretty easy to ignore it. I used to get a few hundred a day of these sorts of messages. Now i see maybe one a week on my screen. When i check my email server's logs i see that the hundreds a day are still being sent, but my filters reject almost all of them.

Whew. I'm definitely learning a whole lot more about how spammers think these days. I've been tracking and fighting them for 15 years. Now i'm even being sued by one simply because i called him a "spammer". The worst part is that it's costing me my own money to defend myself. Sheesh. How annoying can these people make themselves? Oh well, this guy is rapidly losing every lawsuit he's filing, and looks like he may even be heading towards jail time for contempt of court! That will be a good day. :)