Spam with fake notanant.com addresses

As web developers we are very aware of the damage and disruption caused by illegitimate emails, and being website administrators we ourselves receive several thousand spam emails each day wasting time and space we'd rather do without.

Unfortunately there is little we can do to prevent these fake emails. If you are not a developer, you may not realise it, but emails themselves are very easy to fake - even in common packages like Outlook, let alone the mass-mailing machines used by spammers.

When an email is sent, no check is made on the email address the sender says they are emailing from - whether it exists, or whether the email sender has permission to use that address. Consequently, any email address can be used when sending out illigitimate emails, irrespective of whether the sender owns that address or not.

In addition, the emails are sent out from computers totally outside our control. The emails never pass through our servers or systems and so cannot be controled by us. Not only this, but the fake emails cause us disruption with the number of message bounce-backs we receive from companies that reject the fake email, yet send a bounce-back email to the fake email address (adding to the congestion).

If you would like to know more about spam and how to control it we would advise visiting www.spamhaus.org.

Never respond to spam. Spam is illegal, the originators deliberately hide their identities and are often part of or linked to organised crime. There is no knowing what they would do with your credit card details if you buy something, or whether the products they sell are poisons as opposed to medication, contain viruses or keylogger code in the case of software or music downloads, or are ramping overpriced stock that they have already bought cheap and want to sell to suckers.