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Spam is the Peoples' Enemy Number One.
Everybody hates spam, except of course the spammers. It is estimated that 8-9 out of 10 emails sent are spam, and that spam grew by 100% in 2006.
In this article you will find out that the spam isn't necessarily originating from where you think and how the mail servers compound the problem.
We all know that spam is a huge nuisance to companies, large and small, and to individuals, choking up inboxes, incurring costs in purchasing anti-spamware, and wasting valuable time in deleting the ones that inevitably get past the system.

But something you may not know, is that a huge percentage of spam is actually caused by the mailing servers that handle your emails.
That's right, you could be being spammed by the mail servers!
A lot of people who own a company or personal web site with a domain name will have experienced the surprise of opening up their inbox one morning to find it absolutely clogged up with returned messages saying something like 'failed delivery' and then some explanation of why it couldn't be delivered. On closer inspection it all turns out to be spam and appears to have originated from your domain name and is addressed to a load of different companies that you have never heard of.
Here's how it happens.
The web host that hosts your domain name, it may be the same as the web host that hosts your web site or it may not, will have provided you with a webmail account. The settings for this web mail account are often set at 'catch all' and sometimes 'forward to' the email that you gave when you registered for the account. Let's say your domain name is www.mybusiness.com, 'catch all' means that an email addressed to any combination of legal characters before @mybusiness.com will be received in your webmail account. So, for instance admin@mybusiness.com, sales@mybusiness.com, or just a collection of random letters such as awtse@mybusiness.com, will all be accepted. This is useful for companies because if a prospective customer makes a typo or spelling error in the part before @mybusiness.com, the email will still be delivered. It is even more useful for the spammers because they can spam your webmail account directly with random names or letters @mybusiness.com. Now you can prevent the direct spamming quite easily by assigning a few 'hard to guess' names to your webmail account, (not like sales, or admin), and disable the 'catch all. Or, if you wanted to keep the 'catch all' you could invest in some good

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