Brinkster Knowledge Base
Backscatter Spam / Email Spoofing / Compromised Accounts
Backscatter spam occurs when your personal mailbox becomes inundated with bounce back messages which you did not personally send.
Email Spoofing:
Email spoofing is a technique used by spammers to conceal their identities. If your email address has been spoofed, you will receive the bounce back emails for any invalid or closed email accounts the spammer attempted to deliver their junk mail to. The original messages are generally sent from a computer or server connected somewhere on the internet that is under the control of the spammer. Often times, these are compromised personal computers or servers owned and operated by unknown individuals. Unfortunately, these third party systems are not under the control of Brinkster, and therefore it is impossible for us to prevent the sending of these messages.
You can create an email filter in your mail client (outlook), or webmail (webmail.brinkster.com) with rules to delete any bounce back messages. In general, a spammer will use your mailbox as the from email account for a small period of time and move on after a few days or weeks.
Malware / Virus:
On occasion a local computer (or even a mobile device) will become infected with malware or a virus. Some malware programs are built for the purpose of sending spam or junk email. These programs will infect your configured email profile from Outlook, Thunderbird, MacMail, Eudora, and yes, even the email account configured on your mobile device. Once infected, your local device will begin to send unwanted email out to a list of email accounts, possibly even any contacts that are configured in your mail client.
You will also experience bounce back email messages or backscatter spam in this scenario if messages are sent to old, invalid, and closed email accounts.
How to confirm if this is your problem.
The easiest way to confirm if you are experiencing this problem is the change the password listed in your email clients profile temporarily to a password that you know is wrong. Yes, this will break your ability to send and receive email with outlook (or your current mail program), but it will also break the virus' ability to send email. If you make a password change and the problems / bounce messages do NOT continue, you can conclude the trouble is with that specific mail profile. You will want to run a virus / malware scan on your device or contact your local IT professional for assistance.
Compromised Email Account:
It is possible that your email account user name and password has been compromised. In this scenario a hacker / spammer is directly using Brinkster's mail server to send their junk mail, but are authenticating with your email address and password. This usually occurs with email accounts that have configured low security passwords; such as "password", "abc123", and "qwerty".
**Note that Brinkster's email manager no longer allows these low security passwords for this exact reason.
How to confirm if this is your problem.
Changing your email account password will immediately stop the spamming / bounce back activity. Update your mail client profiles with your new password one at a time. If you see that the spamming activity has stopped completely, even after updating all of your email profiles, you can conclude that your email account password was compromised.
If you would like more information about backscatter spam we would suggest that you read this wiki article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_(email)