Understanding Backscatter

"Backscattering" seems to be a term that PC World just made up for the purposes of this article. But the phenomenon it's describing is very real, and—anecdotally at least—seems to be on the rise.

In an effort to get by email filters, spammers often scrape email addresses like yours off the net and use them in the "from" fields of their messages. The spam is still emanating from a remote server, but it often looks like it's coming from, well, you. In other words, a spammer's trying to use your good name to slip by the filters, and because your mail server isn't that bright, it allows out-of-office replies and return-to-sender notes to come to your inbox and spambox. Hence, backscatter.

The bad news is that short of reconfiguring your server, you can't do much about it. The good news is that the spammers have not hacked into your machine in any way and you don't have a virus. In fact, I've found that while I sometimes receive spam emails from inboxes masquerading as me, I've never once heard complaints from any one else that I've been spamming them. So if the spammers are using my address on millions of emails, they're not going to anyone I know.