Artifex's Journal: No legal relief from spammers spoofing my domain name?

For a few years, spammers have been sending out spam pretending to be from my personal, vanity domain. I haven't seen many complaints recently, but it now costs me a considerable amount of time daily to delete hundreds of bounces from mail servers that don't recognized forged headers, etc. The recipients' mail filters are probably also down-rating my domain name as a result, too, further degrading the value of my domain name if I ever want to use it for a commercial venture. I am also concerned about someone trying to hold me accountable for spam sent under my domain's name, as I see a lot of the bounces contain evidence that the payloads have been viruses. Yes, I suspect some of this to be joe jobbing, to get back at me for the years I reported spammers to their hosts.

I'm seriously broke, and don't even know what sort of lawyer I can't afford to hire over this anyway, so has anyone know of anyone who has ever been able to get relief from spammers who are using their domain name? I consider this to be fraud and deliberate misrepresentation on the spammers' part, but I really don't know how I could make anything stick in court, especially when most bouncebacks don't even include full headers with IPs. Some days I feel like just rotating to an unused form of my domain name and letting this form go dormant without any MX for a while, but I doubt that will stop the spammers. It just means I will have ceded the field. But what other choice do I have?

Note: one of the reasons why I'm concerned about being held accountable is that in the one business law class I had, years ago, they had a case study of a company that was sued after someone claiming to be their agent made a bad deal in their name. The company had been advised the person was claiming to be their agent before the deal, but had not told him to stop. The company was ultimately held responsible for the person's actions.

Further note: there are technical reasons why I can't use use SPF right now, but when I had the text fields in my zone file previously, I still had a similar number of bouncebacks, which suggests most servers don't follow them anyway. So don't bother giving that advice.

SPF - good in theory, but you see the reality

[Degrees]

I like SPF. I really do. But as you found, many mail servers don't implement it. Even my own mail server doesn't implement it. The excuse by the programmers was that the SPF standard isn't finalized, and they are waiting for Microsoft to either 1) give up and bless the competing standard, or 2) win authority over the SPF-like standard.

Meanwhile, the spammers win.

I've given up. My mail system auto-trashes mail from addresses I have not seen before - and I have one week to find the legitimate stuff in the trash can. As far as I can tell, I no longer have a spam problem.

Of course, I'm not in a position for hoping new sales leads just randomly appear in my mailbox. Then I'd be really screwed.

Re:

[Artifex]

Thanks for responding. As you may have guessed, I was trying to get this in the back door as an Ask Slashdot, and I hoped posting from my dormant older account instead of my newer one would help. Fat chance :)
I really don't know what I'm gonna do, yet.

Hey, have you joined multiply.com, yet? A bunch of the group has moved there. You should, too.

Re:

[Degrees]

I did think it would make a good Ask Slashdot question. The problem still exists, and discussing it might get people refocused on a solution.

I did just create a multiply account last night; I don't understand it though. I suppose I should read the instructions. ;-)