2008-04-13

We are aware of an uptick in “backscattered” spam which is being bounced back to older accounts at retired or legacy machines (which failover to @cs inboxes). Such messages are not a sign that your account has been hacked or otherwise compromised, as most of the “senders” we have seen are forged to addresses at machines that are no longer online.

Unfortunately, there is little that we can do about such messages, as they represent a failure in the spam identification systems of the remote sites that initially received the spam, which are now bouncing it back to us, and not in our own spam identification infrastructure. (We see such messages not as spam, but as legitimate emails from remote mail servers - which they are - unfortunately they are emails which the remote servers should know better than to send.)

However, should you receive an unmanageable number of such messages, please feel free to alert guru, both to help us in tracking the shape and scope of the phenomenon, and so that we might see about assisting you on a case-by- cases basis at this time. Thank you,