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Question/Problem
What is email spoofing? Can I prevent it?

Answer/Solution
If you're receiving bounced (returned) emails that you have never sent that have your own domains as the return address, and aliases that never existed, then almost always, this is a case of header forgery, aka "Spoofing".

This is how it is done.

1. Spammer finds an email address or a valid domain. (Spammers spend their days looking for these.)

2. Spammer sends off a large email campaign using this domain, and various email tools that prohibit easy tracing of the origin. These tools cloak, scramble or remove the header entirely, removing them from initial blame, because most people just assume the mail actually came from the address it was "sent" from.

3. Innocent domain owner gets mail-flooded with bounce messages from the email addresses that weren't valid, or have blocking capabilities.

4. Spammer gets shut down by his/her ISP inside of a week, due to excessive bandwidth, complaints from people who figured out who actually owned the email, etc.

5. Spammer moves onto the next domain.

As you can see, this is incredibly hard to trace, and unfortunately, the general suggestion to get around this is to ignore the problem. You can create clearly defined/unique aliases, and use only those aliases. Then, set the catch-all to trash anything else. This narrows the possibility of your email box being flooded by returns, while the spammer is finished using that domain.

This is possibly the most frustrating abuse issue to deal with, simply because it cannot be stopped. Spoofing is similar to hand-writing many letters, and signing someone else's name to it. You can imagine a situation like that would be almost impossible to trace.