The InterBiztech email system has incorporated antispam measures based on a sender's outgoing mail server and the email's content.

My friend / customer sent me several emails but informs me they always get bounced back. What should I do?

If you suspect someone is trying to send you email but could not reach you (say on more than 1 occasion), please ask the sender to email rbl-support@interbiztech.com with the servername of IP address of their SMTP server (this informaiton can be obtained from their local PC/Network support team or the customer service dept of their ISP).

I receive email with the word [SPAM] prepended to the subject, but the email is legitimate email (i.e. not spam). What should I do?

Our content evaluation mechanism detected traits and characteristics common with spam email for your particular email, hence has tagged it as spam in the subject line. If this should not be the case in your opinion, please forward the email to spam-support@interbiztech.com. The content evaluation mechanism has the ability to learn so the more feedback you give us, the better spam detection will become. We appreciate your response!

A large quality of "Undeliverable Message" email are landing in my Mailbox, but these emails were not caused by the mail I sent out. What should I do?

Starting in March 2008, we have received enquires from clients regarding significant increase of back-scatter spamming. Back-scatter spam a certain kind of mail you receive that you didn't ask to receive. If you've ever received a “Your mail could not be delivered” bounce notification, a “Your mail contained a virus” notice, or a request to confirm your signup request for a mailing list you've never heard of, you've probably received backscatter. The backscatter problem is inherently linked to the spam problem, as most backscatter received is due to somebody else on the internet doing something bad and spam-related.

The core of the back-scatter problem is that it is trivial to forge the sender address of an email. In normal Internet email, there are no protection mechanisms to authenticate the sender's claimed email address. When a spammer chooses to forge your email address as the sender of his spam, you end-up receiving hundreds or thousands of undeliverable notifications / vacation messages / mailbox full messages, etc -- even though you never sent the original message. That is back-scatter.

Spammers don't want to deal with backscatter, and they don't want complaints coming back; so they forge the sender address in spams they send out. However, while there are no truly standard and universal mechanisms to authenticate a sender's claimed email address, there are mechanisms to validate an email address. So, the simplest solution for the spammer is to forge the sender address to be not his own, but still a valid email address. The spammer simply chooses a random valid email address and uses that. If that random valid email address happens to be yours, however, the result is a huge amount of back-scatter (non-deliverables, vacation messages, etc) directed to your account. The sheer volume of back-scatter can overwhelm mail systems, and use up mailbox storage quota.

For an ordinary person, unfortunately, very little can be done to protect against this. Once you are targeted by a spammer in this way, you will start to receive hundreds or thousands of back-scatter messages each day. Changing your email address is often the only way to solve the problem.

Internet Service Providers(ISPs) can also adopt systems such as SPF, which attempt to provide some spoof protection by clearly listing where your outbound mail is coming from (or digitally signing it). However, these rely on the receiving mail server honoring these protocols and they are not currently universally adopted - so at best such a solution would only reduce the volume of back-scatter.