The SSC Support team has received several inquiries from our email customers about receiving notifications of 'undeliverable' email when they are not the sender. In some cases, another individual's computer is compromised, resulting in the ability to spoof the email "FROM:" field of a SSC email account holder. Since the messages are often infected or come from spammers, the spoofed messages are rejected by SSC's Barracuda and a notification is sent to the SSC email account. Please see a sample below:
From: System
Administrator
Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2008 5:51 AM
To: SSC Support
Subject: Undeliverable: *1*Message you sent was blocked by SSC bulk
email filter*2*
Your message did not reach some or all of
the intended recipients.
Subject: Get the Red Out
Sent: 11/19/2008 5:51 AM
The following recipient(s) cannot be
reached:
ProfJohnSmith@ssc.ucla.edu on 11/19/2008 5:51 AM
You do not have permission to send to this recipient. For assistance,
contact your system administrator.
< barracuda1.sscnet.ucla.edu #5.7.1 smtp; 550 5.7.1 Message content
rejected, UBE, id=32008-01-10>
SSC recommends that our users delete these "false-positive" notifications if they are few in number. Another option is setting up a local filter on your email client to move these messages automatically to a specific folder. Please be sure to review the folder's contents to make sure that there are no legitimate 'undelieverables'. The SSC email administrator can also create server filters to reduce the number of false positives.
Please contact your departmental IT specialist or email support@ssc.ucla.edu if you need help setting local filters or requesting a server side solution.
For more information about email spoofing, please read this WIKIPEDIA article.
Happy & Safe Computing!
SSC Support Team
