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r/techsupport • … • u/shin_scrubgod

Can anything be done about large-scale email spoofing?

Just yesterday, I had to attend a live broadcast being put on by my state for helping employees with unemployment benefits for the small business I work for. To join the broadcast, the service (Webex) prompted me to enter my email, so I used the same work email the state has registered as the company HR rep.

Within minutes, I was getting a constant deluge of bounce notifications from emails from "me" with some bogus subject line about the recipient having missed a call about the pandemic. No idea how many emails are being sent, but the bounces alone quickly reached the thousands. After my account wasn't compromised and these were just being spoofed, I started looking around to see what could be done. So far, the answer appears to be nothing, with most websites I've seen basically just saying "try not to have this happen to you." At the same time, I'm concerned our domain is going to get blacklisted because of this, especially because I'm still constantly getting new auto-replies from this, and I'd like to prevent all these random businesses from getting all this garbage, so I want to do something about it if at all possible.

I've confirmed the work computer this is done on is clean of malware, the emails aren't going out from the account, and our service provider (1and1) was already supposed to be providing some limited spoof protection that doesn't appear to be helping. Is there anything else I can do to stop this?

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