How to get rid of spam e-mails coming in by the (literally) thousands?

Question

Okay, so my mother made a website a long time ago, and she's recently started working on it again. However, the last month or so, she's been receiving spam emails. Most of them show up as:

"Delivery Status Notification (failure)"

but they're all being sent from just a random string of characters then @ (website name). Like [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail], and they're coming in literally every minute. She deletes roughly 3,000 per day right now.

I'm not sure if she's managed to pick up a virus somewhere that's trying to send out e-mails from her account, or something else, but I tried a virus scan once and didn't find anything.

Another thing, shouldn't there be a way to filter so that only a certain email (say [e-mail]) gets through, and not every prefix possible?

If anyone has any suggestions, it's driving her crazy, which is in turn causing her to drive me crazy, so any help is appreciated. :)

Yeah, I had a feeling you'd say that, youngdominic. I'll look that up and see what I can figure out on that end, though.

Ah okay, we somewhat solved the problem. Called our hosting service, and determined they had her email address set up as a "catchall", so any prefix @ her website would forward to her primary email. They disabled it, and now they're gone. :)

Sucks that there's still thousands out there getting spammed with those addresses, but that's nothing that I can control.

Answer 1

The answer is really an e-mail challenge service - people who e-mail your mother on this troublesome address get an e-mail back asking them to verify that they are a human being. Only then does their message get delivered to your mother's inbox. I'm not sure how to set these up - maybe some software needs to get installed on the PC which filters mails or Outlook Express.

Do some research on e-mail challenge services - it usually costs a small subscription, but can be excellent.

Ultimately it may be necessary to abandon this problem address and get another, unfortunately.

Answer 2

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