Spoofing or Forging of our e-mail addresses

I have recently discovered spammers have been sending e-mails that look like messages from beachwebdesign.co.uk.

My domain name, as well as other respected names, has been forged by spammers who are faking other people's email addresses. This spam has not come from our website or email accounts, but the addresses have been inserted into the return address fields of spam emails by someone else using a different computer. There is nothing I can do to stop this and I regret that very much.

I have nothing to do with this spam, which is a misrepresentation of my good name. I have never sent any kind of spam emails. In fact, as a hosting provider myself, my terms and conditions oppose the use of my hosting or email accounts for "spamming".

If you have received spam email that appears to be from this domain I am very sorry. All I can do is emphasise that it did not come from here and is beyond my control. I have added SPF (Sender Policy Framework) records to my DNS TXT fields, which may help some email programs to automatically reject spoof emails from this domain, but other than that I regret very much there is nothing I can do to prevent people from doing this. It is a nuisance to me as well as to those who receive it.

I've written in more detail about this episode in an Email Spoofing post to my blog.

For more information on email spoofing, see 'Help, Spam and Virus Questions' from DNS Central, and the Anti Email Spoofing and Anti-Spam pages from BestSearchers.com, (Best Web Sites, Search Engines & online Shopping Stores).

If you receive spam:

• If you ever receive spam that looks like messages sent by beachwebdesign.co.uk, please send me the original spoofed e-mail as an attachment, including the header information, to provide the best chance of tracing it.
• Never respond to requests for personal information in the forged e-mail, in fact never reply to them at all or they will know your address is genuine.
• Please don't do anything which might cause beachwebdesign.co.uk to be wrongly blacklisted as a spammer.

Thank you for your help and understanding,

Annabel Treshansky, Beach Web Design