I've been a bit confused lately as to what types of spam are within my control and that which is out of my control - so I wanted to make sure that I understood the difference between the two.

Tonight while I was no where near a computer, I was barraged on my blackberry with undeliverable messages, returned to me (aka the sender) from mailboxes that didn't exist or from mail servers who had flagged the message as spam. There were about 188 of them in a 15 minute window, so I don't want to think about the messages that even got through. This irks me more than anything due to the fact that they (whoever the spammers are) are using my name and email address to send spam with and I am going to end up on a blacklist if I haven't done so already. No where on my site do I have my email address listed, either.

So, whenever this happens, I always get freaked out that someone has taken over my mail server to send spam, even though I know this isn't a usual case, only that they spoof my email address and anyone can write a sendmail() script to do it, but it still scares me in thinking I've been totally hacked.

So, my question is - is there any way to stop this? I'm guessing the answer is no, but then my other question is why don't spammers use gmail or yahoo or msn addresses as well? Never before have I had returned messages from one of those accounts, so what is going on here?

Since I'm running my own DNS, is there a way that I can counteract this type of thing?

Thanks,
Charles H.