On a specific e-mail account, outside of AFFCOM, I started receiving several hundred "Delivery Status Notification Failure" messages. I did not send the original messages, which failed to deliver to the intended recipient.

What happened in this case is that a Spammer out of Korea was using one of my e-mail address as his return address. The name on the e-mail was not mine, but the return address was. Spammers own large lists of e-mail addresses, typically in the tens to hundreds of thousands. Naturally, some of the e-mail addresses in the list become invalid over time. In the case of invalid e-mails, the hosting server of the domain flags the e-mail address as invalid and returns a notification to the sender. In this case, the return address was falsely set as mine, and I started receiving all of the "Delivery Status Notification Failure" messages. There were a total of 1,154 of these failures.

While the 1,154 failure messages were a nuisance, my greater concern is that perhaps several hundred thousand others are under the assumption that I sent this SPAM. This is not only embarrassing, but can cause additional unwarranted e-mails with people angrily responding to a SPAM mail that I never started.

Spammers visit various sites, locate a valid e-mail address and use this as their return address.

There are a couple of fixes to prevent this from happening:

1. Rather than using your full e-mail address on the site, have a "Click Here" and a link to your e-mail utilizing regular HTML. This is not a total safeguard against e-mail address acquisition since your e-mail remains in viewable HTML source code. Note: you can view the source HTML (and client-side JavaScript) by:
   • Internet Explore toolbar going to VIEW > Source;
   • Netscape Navigator toolbar going go VIEW > Page Sources;
   • You can also right mouse on any part of the screen, except an image, scroll to Source or Page Source and see it that way as well.
2. The fool-proof method is to have web site communications effected through on-line forms. While the form can be e-mailed to any e-mail address or addresses desired, the coding of the form can all be performed in server-side script that is totally invisible and inaccessible to the visitor.

An additional benefit is that it hides any and all e-mail addresses from Spammers endeavoring to collect e-mails for their Spam lists.

The chances of your e-mail being used as mine are fairly remote and we have been somewhat negligent in advising customers who requested e-mail addresses on their site about its potential affects. The situation encountered with our own addressing has obviously shed some new light on the potential problems e-mail addresses on sites can cause.