What You Need to Know About Mailer-Daemon Spam

When you send an email to a non-existent address, the mailer-daemon replies that it was not delivered. If you suddenly find yourself bombarded with delivery failure emails, it may be because someone has been sending emails from your address.

• What Is Mailer-Daemon?
• What is Mailer-Daemon Spam?
• How to Deal with Mailer-Daemon Spam
• Is There Any Effort Being Made to Prevent Mailer-Daemon Spam?

What Is Mailer-Daemon?

Email is a virtual postal service. When you send a message, it goes to the mailer-daemon server. This server forwards the message to other servers until it reaches the recipient’s inbox. Undeliverable mailer-daemon error messages are sent back to the sender.

What is Mailer-Daemon Spam?

Mailer-daemons do not use the From address to determine sender. So a mailer-daemon uses the email header, which contains the sender’s address. Spammers can send messages that appear to be from you without accessing your account by forging your email header. You get mailer-daemon spam if they send emails to old addresses.

Because every email must have a sender in the From line, spammers often look up random addresses in people’s contacts to use for phishing and other malicious purposes.

Infecting your computer and infecting your address book is possible if you open an email containing a virus or worm. Receiving mailer-daemon spam does not mean you have malware, but you should take precautions.

How to Deal with Mailer-Daemon Spam

If you get mailer-daemon spam, take these steps:

1. Scans your PC and devices for malware. When scanning for malware, disconnect from the internet. After that, change all of your account passwords.
2. Mark the mailer-daemon as spam. Most email programs let you mark emails as spam. For example, when you report spam in Gmail, Gmail uses the email’s content to block future spam.
3. Tell your pals. If you get mailer-daemon spam, you may have infected some of your contacts. Remind people to ignore any suspicious messages from your address.

Is There Any Effort Being Made to Prevent Mailer-Daemon Spam?

Email servers take steps to reduce the number of useless delivery notifications. They might check for forged return addresses before sending a delivery failure message. No error email is sent if the sender’s address is obvious.

Large volumes of delivery failures for an address (usually with spam or malware content) may be silently deleted or quarantined in your spam folder.