returned mail
 

Why do I get this as returned when I have not sent a message to this address

Each of the following recipients was rejected by a remote mail server.
Recipient: <rv231@cam.ac.uk>
Reason: <rv231@cam.ac.uk> is not a known user on this system;

John

Re: returned mail
 

Spoofing - somebody is "spoofing" your email address. Have you got the full bounce please?

Re: returned mail
 

More detail:

Somebody is sending emails to this address, but using your email address as the 'return' address. This is a common tactic used by spammers, or by people attempting to create a denial of service condition on the associated mail servers.

There is (theoretically) little that you can do about it, other than to route all emails from that domain (assuming you have no legitimate contacts there) directly to your junk mail folder.

I had a concerted attack against one of my domains last year. At the peak of it I was receiving thousands of these 'bounced' emails per hours, all of them from different domains throughout the world, In the end I had to just tell the mail server to drop all incoming mail traffic until such time as the attack stopped.

That was a fun time :)

Re: returned mail
 

Rob thank you. the whole message was ...
This Message was undeliverable due to the following reason:

Each of the following recipients was rejected by a remote mail server.
The reasons given by the server are included to help you determine why
each recipient was rejected.

Recipient: <rv231@cam.ac.uk>
Reason: <rv231@cam.ac.uk> is not a known user on this system; see http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/email/bounce.html


Please reply to <Postmaster@ispmail.ntl.com>
if you feel this message to be in error.

The following attachments have been removed from the bounce message:
Reporting-MTA: dns; mtaout03-winn.ispmail.private.ntl.com
Arrival-Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2009 11:08:47 +0000
Received-From-MTA: dns; aamtaout03-winn.ispmail.ntl.com (81.103.221.35)

Final-Recipient: RFC822; <rv231@cam.ac.uk>
Action: failed
Status: 5.1.1
Remote-MTA: dns; mx.cam.ac.uk (131.111.8.147)
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; 550-<rv231@cam.ac.uk> is not a known user on this system;
550 see http://www.cam.ac.uk/cs/email/bounce.html