Spam backscatter

[#1]

I have my own domain and email address, which forwards to a Force9 (Plusnet) address, which has spam control turned on.

Quite a lot of the spam sent to my domain address now has my own email address in the 'sent' field.

Plusnet spam filtering bounces obvious spam/scam back to sender - as it sees me as the sender, the bounce message comes back to me at my domain address, which then forwards to my Force 9 address.

Anyone have any easy solutions to this? I don't want to filter email out that appear to be from myself, as I do sometimes send email to myself just to make documents easy to find.

[#2]

If you host the domain outside of Plusnet you should be able to set a SPF record on your domain, which will stop the more reputable mail services from accepting the messages in the first place, if they don't originate from your designated servers.

If you host the domain with Plusnet, you won't be able to do this.

Moderator's note by Mike (Mav): Link fixed.

[#3]

Not sure that's going to help unless the server that does the forwarding silently drops anything that fails SPF checks. Any server rejecting mail due to an SPF fail would lead to the same problem the OP is trying to resolve.

I think this has something to do with the forwarding. I have a personal domain and I get loads of spam sent to it where the from/return address is my domain name. My server rightfully rejects these messages yet I never see failed delivery reports hitting my inbox.

[#4]

I'll look at the hosting service to see if there are any facilities around SPF and controlling sentencing.

If not, maybe I'll try to set up a filter in Thunderbird (I keep a copy running on my home machine at all times to do spam filtering) to try to spot this backscatter rejection and drop it into spam.

I used to use a spamcop email address and the spam filtering facilities were superb, but they pulled the email service 😞