A note about email abuse

We have recently been hit with an abuse of our email address by parties unknown, and we apologize to anyone who may have been plagued by these notices. Please be assured that they did not originate from us.

Spammers are engaging in an activity known as “spoofing”. This is a behaviour where they are able to send spam around the world by imitating legitimate email addresses and business names for the purpose of hiding their own identity. Typically this is done to try to get a small percentage of people to click on an embedded link in the email, at which point the spammers have what they want. Not many people are fooled by this anymore, but it is still incredibly annoying.

We have made considerable efforts using a variety of techniques to trace the spammers through their originating IP addresses, and we have reported this abuse to the appropriate authorities around the world. The majority of these contacts (although not all) are being routed through Amsterdam at the present time. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are also victims of these activities as it ties up bandwidth, and makes things quite difficult for the people within their organizations responsible for controlling email and internet abuse.

This has come to our attention because all the undeliverable email sent by the spammers using our “spoofed” address gets redirected back to our “catchall” account. This means we have quite a bit of work to do sorting out what is junk from any real problems we might encounter in the course of going about our honest business. Of course, we are not alone in this. Other companies and individuals are affected too.

So please accept our apologies if you have received email(s) using our registered domain name and email extension. We will continue to do everything we can to notify the appropriate authorities to help make it stop.

For better or for worse, the internet is still an unregulated environment, which, for the most part, is a good thing.

Unfortunately, spamming and internet abuse is likely to remain a problem for some time to come. This hurts us all, because it stands in the way of real communication.

Garrett Klassen
The 3 Bears Bed and Breakfast