Ron, sorry to have to tell you but you are probably stuck between a rock and a hard place with the email. If there were some way that you could stop people getting your (or your wife’s) email addresses to use, that would be the easy solution. Are your email address and your wife’s both on the same domain (the bit of the email address after the @ symbol)? If not, get her to contact somebody else that she knows to see if they received the same sort of junk mail, as this may indicate that their mail server has been hacked and all the addresses in the address book were used by those involved. I am pretty certain that your wife’s email domain must have open relay disabled, otherwise it would likely to be blacklisted and her email would not work at all.
When the protocols were written for sending (SMTP) and receiving (POP3) email, the authors did not contemplate anybody wanting to abuse them, so they made them very simple. Back in those days, the WWW did not exist with access for everyone it was just a bunch of academics around the world. Ironically, the problems of spoof email and phishing have been well known since the 90s but the last time a proposal was made on an idea to resolve it, they could not get consensus on implementing what would be a massive change globally.
When you receive email from addresses that you do not want to recognise, it is easy enough to program the email client to filter them out as junk; hence the people sending this junk now put the recipient’s email address as the sender so it cannot be blocked. In order to get the email to you they have to bounce it off a legitimate mail server to which they have gained access.
A few years ago, I wrote a program that I used internally at the company where I was working. On the Monday morning, I could send emails to colleagues who were fans of Hull FC and KR that had the name of their team’s coach as the ‘From’ field, apologising for how badly they had played on Sunday. The Reply-Path address of the emails was set to my email address. I could do this because I could bounce the emails of the company’s internal email server using my company email access.
Most of the junk email that I get these days has the name of some legitimate organisation in the ‘To’ field when it arrives but if I click the Reply button in MS Outlook and actually examine the intended reply address in the new email it is a domain in Russia, one of the Baltic states or China.
Now, Ron, if you can send me your bank details, I am sure that my man in Nigeria can supply you with the pills that you need to make you six inches bigger and irresistible to every woman in France...
