If you have received junk email from the Benbecula domain, that looks
like spam, it didn't come from us. The Benbecula domain name, like
many others, has been victim of "spoofing", in other words pretending to
originate from our domain.
Over the last few years the explosion of the internet has regrettably
allowed the general public to get involved, and therefore also unscrupulous
marketing companies.
One of the oldest tricks in the book is to send an email and pretend to be
someone else. For example it is a very simply procedure to send an
email where the "From:" field is say, "god@heaven.com".
The reason this is possible is that, in basic terms, the basic protocol used
by mail servers does not really care that the domain used in the "From:"
field does not match any domain names hosted by that server.
One way to quickly verify that junk mail you received IS NOT from Benbecula
is to look in the header information of the email. For example in
Outlook, open the email and go to View->Options.
In this stuff you will see a few lines that begin with "Received From".
What to look for is the LAST line that starts "Received From". The
information in this part tells you who actually sent the email, or at least
their host name and IP address. You can then use this information to
complain to the ISP or host that whoever originated the email is sending
junk. Or, simply forward the email (and possibly copy and paste the
header information) to your ISP and ask them to follow it up.
Hopefully they will blacklist that host.
The mistake many ISPs make is too blacklist the domain in the "From:"
field! Doh!!!
More importantly, genuine email sent by Benbecula will always have the
host name "blueyonder" in the last "Received From" part described above.
This is not a 100% guarantee, however, we don't send emails about Viagra and
the like and so this is the easiest way to tell.
