For the last week or so, I’ve been dealing with a new form of “spam” that’s particularly annoying. Instead of the spammer sending me mail directly, they’ve been sending spam as me, using made up addresses at blowery.org (like asdfasdf@blowery.org). The sent mail is bounced by the destination mail server, and guess who it bounces back to? That’s right, me. I have a wildcard filter set up on my mail server, so mail sent to *@blowery.org eventually gets back to me. Sadly, this includes failure to deliver notices as well as standard mail, as SMTP doesn’t really differentiate between the two.
To make matters a bit worse, Exchange (in it’s infinite wisdom) forwards these rejections on to me as notices which are not really email. How very Notes of you, Exchange. You can’t filter notices using rules and they’re not picked up by spam filters, so you’re basically stuck with ’em. Sad.
So, at this point, I’m not sure what to do. I don’t want to turn off my wildcard, as I create madeup email accounts for all sorts of things, mainly so I can filter on that address if someone starts spamming it. I could start setting up specific forwards, but that doesn’t really help me when I’m signing up for a newsletter at a fruit stand and want to make up a new one.
Does anyone with more Exchange experience than I have a way to fix this? Can I somehow tell Exchange not to send me these notices, or change the expiration on them? I noticed that it seems they expire after a couple days; could I try to get that reduces to a couple hours? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.