On Saturday morning I awoke to the lovely sound of multiple emails arriving to my phone. Thinking that I might have had a few ‘hellos’ from friends or family, I got up to have a look to see whether the day might have any interesting social activities ahead. To my surprise, there were hundreds of emails waiting in my inbox. Well, this was a highly unusual occurrence. As I investigated, I discovered that it was a plethora of bounced emails. How unusual indeed! Then the penny dropped. Somehow, I’d been hijacked by some damned spammers! The technical term I’ve since gleaned is called “spoofing”. It’s where a spammer either generates a new random email address from their ‘bot, or they have actually phished your email address by sending out spam emails that might have accidentally clicked on. I think I did the latter a day earlier. What an idiot! I had received an email from a well know car seller and I thought “how dare they send me an unsolicited email?!”. So, like an idiot, I clicked on the link to unsubscribe. I’ve narrowed that down to being my fatal mistake. Within 24 hours, I’ve received over 5000 bounced emails which had been sent using my email address. Of course, I had nothing to do with it. My poor little innocent email address is being used to clog up inboxes all over the world, selling or proliferating who knows what. The spammers just stole my email address to the dirty work, and in a month or so I guess they’ll move on to someone else, and so on and so on. What makes it so incredibly frustrating is that there is apparently absolutely nothing you can do about it. You just have to sit it out.
So, my sincere apologies go to anyone who receives an unsolicited email from me. I’m the innocent party in all this.