Email “Delivery Failure” Messages
What do all those unfamiliar “delivery failure” messages in your Inbox mean?
This may have happened to you: You’re reviewing your new email, and you see a bunch of messages from strange names like “Mailer Daemon”:
"Mail Delivery System" <Mailer-Daemon at example dot com> Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2008 04:44:24 -0600 To: <you at youraddress dot com> Subject: failure notice This message was created automatically by mail delivery software. A message that you sent has not yet been delivered to one or more of its recipients after more than 24 hours on the queue on mail.example.com. The message identifier is: 1JYIJ1-0008Ew-JK The date of the message is: 10 Mar 2008 10:02:56 +010 The subject of the message is: Buy Viagra The address to which the message has not yet been delivered is: some-unfamiliar-email-address at example dot com.
You’ve received messages like this in the past when you mistyped an email address, but these emails don’t look familiar at all. What’s going on? Has your account been hijacked?
Well, no. At least, not in the traditional sense.
What’s Going On?
Although it’s possible that the account was hijacked, the more likely explanation is that a spammer is pretending to send email as you by using your email address as the “From” address. Then, when they inevitably send spam to a mailbox that no longer exists (or is full, or the email is deemed suspicious), the destination post office sends the return message (the “bounceback”) to you.
You can do the same thing with regular “snail” mail. Write your neighbor’s address in the return address field of an envelope and mail it to a nonexistent address. The post office will return the mail to your neighbor rather than you. (Note: Please don’t do this.)
You may be surprised to learn that there are no technological defenses to prevent somebody from sending emails using your email address! This is because the original creators of the Internet didn’t anticipate this kind of abuse. Now the worldwide tech community is playing a sort of catch-up game of escalating tactics with the spammers.
What To Do
Unfortunately, there’s nothing to stop someone from doing this. If the returned email is obviously not yours, then it’s best just to ignore and delete it. Usually these messages come in surges but go away fairly quickly, after the spammer moves on and uses a different email address for his next batch.
Spam filters might not catch these bounceback messages, because the messages are valid mail system messages, even if they are referring to spam.
The best way to prevent spammers from using your address in the “From” field is the same as the best way to prevent spammers from using it in the “To” field — don’t publish your email address out on the web where spam robots can harvest it and add it to their collection.
Update: One thing you can do is set up a rule in your email software to filter out these emails. Most return messages are sent from postmaster@ or mail-daemon@ addresses. Note that this will also filter out legitimate emails.
More Information
Read More
- 5 Myths About Spam
- What is this email I received about keeping my domain information up-to-date?
- How Expensive Is Your Email?
- Dealing With Winmail.dat Problems
- Stuck Emails in Outlook Outbox
You can also subscribe to our newsletter or browse our archives.
Join the Discussion
Leave a Reply
About the Author
Subscribe via RSS
Thanks for the “plain English” post. I am getting a ton of these irritating messages and it reminds me that I must take my email off my site. It is conspicuously listed there.
Rec. message: Delivery has failed to this recipient. The recipient’s email was not found in the recipient’s email system. I used to send emails to this person (toddamend@remax.com). Now I can’t. I sometimes get this message: mailerdaemon – sorry, we were unable to deliver your message. I never had these problems before, and on top of everything else, Staples just went over my hp laptop because of all the problems I was having; however, now they say they couldn’t find “any” problems.
@deb It is a good idea to not publish your personal email address on your site. It used to be expected, but with the spam issues that exist it is better to post a general email address for people to send to rather then your personal email. Contact forms can offer a better solution as well. At minimum use CAPTCHA or some sort of email obfuscation if you are going to publish your emails on a website.
THIS IS THE ERROR MESSAGE i GET WITH ONLY ONE FRIEND.. hE AND i HAVE BEEN TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHY i HAVE A PROBLEM SENDING HIM EMAIL ON MY MSN ACCOUNT/ MY GMAIL WORKS. HE CAN SEND IT TO ME, BUT WHEN i SEND IT TO HIM IT COMES BACK, DELIVERY FAILURE, HE’S THE ONLY PROBLEM?? HELP