Collateral Spam

You receive collateral spam when someone forges your email address in order to distribute spam. People and computers assume that you are the one sending spam, and you receive collateral spam in the form of:

• Delivery failure reports: often hundreds of them. Other institutions have rejected 'your' spam and are now informing you.
• Virus warnings: if 'your' spam contains a virus, other institutions will detect it and then warn you.
• Complaints from people who think you've sent them spam.

You'll receive many copies of messages that seem to be from your email address, but they are written in several different languages.

There's not much you can do if this happens to you, but you can minimise the risk by making sure your email address does not appear on any web page.

If people complain that you've sent spam, send the a polite reply along the lines of:

Thanks for telling me about the spam sent in my name. This sounds like 'collateral spam' which I did not send, I too am a victim. Collateral spam is detailed on the CiCS webpages at:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/cics/security/cspam.html

Sorry for any inconvenience.