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One of my users received a spam message from his internal exchange server on an SBS 2003 machine. The message apparently orginated from an unknown user from his own domain. (i.e. [email protected] received a spam message from [email protected]) However, [email protected] does not exist and there is no mailbox for him. I checked and there are no open relays. What do I need to do to figure out how this happened and how to stop it? The message did show up in the message tracking center. With the following info:

[email protected]
SMTP:Message Submitted to Advanced Queuing
SMTP:Started Message Submission to Advanced Queue
SMTP:Message submitted to Categorizer
SMTP:Message Categorized and Queued for Routing
SMTP:Message Queued for Local Delivery
SMTP:Message delivered locally to [email protected]
SMTP:Store Driver: Message Delivered Locally to Store to [email protected]
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I would not spend a lot of time trying to trace it. And frankly, if it is the only one, then I would not spend any more time even worrying about it. The message certainly came from outside the domain, because if Exchange is not set to relay, and there is no [email protected], then the message did not originate on your server. Forging the from address is very common in spam. So you do not have to worry about a virus/bot infested computer.

If you must, then (as Ward noted in the comment), you need to examine the message headers to find the IP address of the original sending machine. I con't recall exactly how to see the headers in Exchange 2003, but it can be done.

If there is a more serious spam problem, better to crank up the anti-spam features than to try and find individual culprits.

As an aside .. it really is time to suck it up and upgrade Exchange.

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