Yahoo Auto Response?

Question

Someone who just joined one of my groups immediately started getting spam emails and junk emails with Yahoo Auto Response in the in the subject line. No one else in the group is getting these emails. What can be done to stop these emails. They are being sent to his normal email address and he does not have a Yahoo email address.

Answer 1

He may ban the sender of the mails.

Answer 2

(Some of this is wrong...see the edit below)

I've received a bunch of these too. I'm searching for others via google right now, and that's how I came across your post. If you look at the headers in one of the emails, you'll see that it's actually being sent by some sort of a yahoo server. I don't know if that's a mail proxy for their web IM portal (example MTA: web59011.mail.re1.yahoo.com) or what, but something apparently allows a user to send an instant message with only their email address as a from. They set up a throwaway account with an auto-reply, and send a message to it with this person's email as the sender. Yahoo sends the auto-reply (the throwaway account's spam auto-reply) to the spoofed sender address.

I've emailed yahoo about it recently, and hopefully they'll shut down whatever is making the spam possible.

The messages will probably pass most spam filters, as they contain few and valid Received headers from (normally I guess) decent hosts, and have valid domain keys as well. It's pretty crappy. Let's hope it ends soon.

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Edit:

Looks like I was off. This is just a general "auto response" email (aka vacation response). Yahoo should not allow this as it's ripe for abuse. It allows basically the same thing I described above. Set up a throwaway account, put a spam auto-response message on it, and send it an email with a forged from address (the victim's address). The auto-reply sends the spam to the forged address.

The timing of this person starting to get the spam when joining your group is a coincidence.

Answer 3

This is an Automated Response. Do not reply to it. Your question will be answered by and expert. Please stay one the line

Answer 4

he needs to click spam button when they come in to block the address from further messages.