what to do about joe-jobs?

Wed Sep 24 18:14:08 UTC 2003

On Wed, 24 Sep 2003, Stephen L Johnson wrote:

> Please forgive my ignorance, but what is a "joe-job"?

I dug up some links for you.

http://www.spamfaq.net/terminology.shtml#joe_job
http://www.techtv.com/news/culture/story/0,24195,3415219,00.html
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/J/joe-job.html
http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=Joe%20Job (might be down?)

Basically it's of spoofing the source of spam so as to appear to come from 
an innocent person.  I've been on the receiving end of it a couple of 
times.  Basically the innocent person gets flooded with bounces from 
poorly written MTAs and anti-spam scripts.  Think email-based virus 
bounces.  You didn't send the virus; you aren't even infected.  However 
some machine somewhere is infected and spoofed your address as source of 
the infected email.  You of course end up with the bounce and 
blame from uneducated people for being infected (which again you are not).

Hope that helps
 Justin