Just had 13 "returned e mail" spams to random prefixes at my address; forwarded one or two on
to spam training & ironport.

 

I wouldnt bother, that is back scatter and if you are lucky you will only get 500 in the next day or two, then it will stop

Basically some oik has sent spam using made up versions of your email addresses as the FROM entry.

If the address the spam was sent to was also fake, the servers would have bounced the message back to you to tell you that "your" email couldn't be delivered.

That is what you are receiving. There is not a lot you can do about it unfortunately, other than ride it out.

I had 10,000 in one weekend last time it happened to me! (I had to leave outlook open 24/7 for downloading them quick enough, or the backlog was enough to crash Outlook!). Hopefully you will have a quieter time of it.

Mike

Surely better to log into webmail and delete them from the server without downloading them?  Or am I missing something obvious (as usual!)?

if he was using web mail he might hit the limit and not be able to delete, however if he used Thunderbird and IMAP, he could delete 500 at a time, a much better idea

There has been a lot of reference to this on the Community Forum lately (I was badly affected in early May).  I wonder whether this is the "next stage" for spammers for using the Plusnet addresses that were hijacked in the "cyber break in" two years ago??