Spamming and spoofing
Early in 2008, this site became a victim of spoofing. This is a technique where spammers bombard the world with their obnoxious emails but disguise their origin by using a real (and innocent) domain name.
I became aware that the spacestories.com domain name was being spoofed when I began to receive a torrent of automatic responses from various recipients. The emails are not really coming from this site and they are totally outside the control of myself and of Google who actually host this site. All one can do is weather the storm which will eventually subside.
From my own research on the web, I get the impression that the problem has arisen because the spammers have used a virus to hijack the computer of someone who has either visited this site or has a spacestories.com address listed in his address book. That person's computer is probably now spewing out the spam while they remain blissfully unaware.
So apologies if you have been a victim of the mystery spammers but, as you can hopefully appreciate, these problems are not of our making.
Paul
