Joe job

It was going to be one of those days.

I checked my email and found around 400 bounce emails. Someone had sent a load of junk emails and many of those emails failed to deliver. 400 mail servers thought I should know about it.

The problem is known as a "Joe job". Even though I had nothing to do with the junk mail, the spammer wrote my address down as the sender and the mail servers reported the error to me, since they incorrectly presumed I had sent it. Its trivially easy to do and spammers do it all the time. The only correspondence they are interested in involve payment, so they deflect complaints to innocent third parties.

This time, the spam was for some teeth whitening product. Last time it happened, the spam was advertising "CH1LD P0RN0 PH0T0S".

This could happen to anyone, I was just a random name off a list. Fortunately for me, I have a good business relationship with my ISP and they understand I have nothing to do with this. If it happens to you, contact your ISP and inform them of the situation. If you have evidence of a crime, inform the police.