How Do I Stop Bounced Spam Mails From Returning To Me?

If you getting tonnes of returned mails with your email addresses as the senders of the mails, you are probably a victim of a joe-job.

This is when the spammer actually put your email address as the sender and attempt to send spam. If the receiving mail server detects that the email is spam, it will bounce the mail back to the sender which is your email address.

There is a solution to this issue and it is by specifying a TXT record in your DNS servers (you must own the domain name in order to implement it) with the following entry;

If you a Singnet customer, just add Singnet's mail server as allowed mail from server and leave the rest intacted.

v=spf1 a mx include:mail.singnet.com.sg ~all

The a means that any A records' IP addresses stated in your DNS will be allowed, the mx means the MX records' IP addresses will be allowed. The ~all means all the IP addresses allowed are already listed, any others outside this range are not authorized to send emails for your domain.

If you are a Starhub or Pacific Internet's customer, just replace the text mail.singnet.com.sg with your ISP's outgoing mail server.

If you're still unsure, you may go to SPF configuration page to get more info.

These records were recently implemented on our client's DNS servers because of the aggressive reporting of the spam mails to SPAMCOP, we apparently upset them enough to cause them to launch a massive joe-job against us.

Ideally if you have access to your domain's DNS servers, which is most probably hosted at your registrar, you should set the record only when you start receiving your first bounce mail so that when you set it soon after, the spammer will wake up the next morning to see none of his spam mails sent using your email addresses get through and he has wasted one day of his spamming life.

There is no negative impact for putting a TXT record on your DNS servers because what it does basically as the name implies, it is just a text record.

You set the TXT record and then try nslookup, set type=TXT, type your domain name after that and see for yourself.

Following is a simple form to check for Whois information covering IP Block owners, many TLDs & ccTLDs.

No error checking is done on entries so you will need to ensure that the input are correct or you will not get correct result.