Mailbombing or e-mail bomb is a form of net abuse consisting of sending huge volumes of e-mail to an address in an attempt to overflow the mailbox or overwhelm the server. This is something that I’ve played around with more than 10 years ago. During that time if you mailbomb someone, their slow computers would even hang when trying to access the inbox because it contains thousands of same or random messages. You can do that and get away with it but if you do that NOW, you can get into trouble with the law and end up in jail.

So instead of doing it from their computer, nowadays people would just install a mass mailing PHP or CGI script to automate mailbombing someone using the server’s resources. There are two things to do when being mailbombed. First is to know how to trace where the email came from via headers and next is to perform an inbox cleanup.

I’ve been mailbombed once from a Sikh guy who resides in India which I managed to trace the origin of the mailbombing activity have that site “SUSPENDED”. Cleaning up the junk mails took only a second. Now, a Spanish speaking person from Argentina is doing the same thing and I’ve already reported the abuse to the webhost.

I am going to show you how I trace the email messages and also how I easily cleanup my inbox after being mailbombed.

Before deleting email bomb messages, you should trace where the email came from. Simply view the email headers to check the origin of the email.

You can refer to this excellent article on how to view the full headers for an email using some popular email clients such as Outlook Express, Hotmail, MSN, Yahoo, Gmail, Thunderbird, Eudora and etc. Once you know how to view the email headers, you should learn how to determine who sent you that email and where are they located. Here is another complete tutorial to help you figure out who sent you that nasty email and report them to the proper authorities!

Once you’ve reported the email bombing activity to the proper authorities, you can go ahead and delete those nasty emails from your inbox. For web based email, you can always save any real mails that you got and delete all the rest (any web-based mail account should have such a feature). Or if you’re using Gmail, it’s even easier. As you can see at the image below, deleting 300 over emails is just a matter of clicking a few check boxes and then click the Delete button.

Now, to delete those hundreds or thousands of useless mails in your POP3 mailbox, you can use Mailbox Exterminator to delete all the mail in your POP account. This program will not filter, but delete ALL mails that it finds. It is useful to clean up and account that you haven`t used in a while and is filled up with spam or similar. Just enter the POP server address, username, password and click the Zap Mailbox button.

Or if you have some important emails that you want to keep in inbox, you can use QuickDelete or pop3clean. QuickDelete only downloads the email header (which is small) and you can easily mark the messages that you want to delete. As for pop3clean, you have to create an auth file (no extension) in the same directory as pop3clean. It contains two lines, namely username and password in that order.

The spanish mailbomber accused me of spamming my blog and he is mailbombing me out of revent. He is wrong! A user would have to subscribe for the newsletter himself and VERIFY the subscription by clicking the verification link in his email. Even if I can enter a person’s email address in Feedburner subscription list, the person would have to confirm the subscription before the daily newsletter email will be sent to him. Finally, he can unsubscribe himself from the newsletter by clicking the unsubscribe link at the end of the newsletter email.

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