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Many years ago, I purchased a domain name my whole family could use for email addresses, as we were all living in different parts of the world. The idea was that we could all be firstname@lastname.com (or whatever). Some time later, I let my father take over the maintenance of it, because I inevitably forgot to pay the renewal, and we lost it for awhile, inconveniencing everyone.
So tonight, my dad phones to ask what he can do about the fact that someone is trying to use our domain by sending fraudulent emails. Apparently, they have been entering any firstname until they get a 'hit', and my dad's inbox (as the default box of the domain) gets flooded with 100s of messages saying that 'his message' could not be sent.
How can he put a stop to the problem, and what authority actually chases down the people/computers that do this?
It sounds like a spammer somewhere is sending emails purporting to be from your domain?
Email is inherently insecure and doesn't have a good way to prevent this (arguably a feature). But there are some things you can do to help.
Turn on spf records for your domain, and turn on domainkeys. It won't fix it completely, but it should help.