I have been getting a ton of bounced-back spam which I never sent in
the first place--obviously, somebody is forging my domain. I am ignorant about this
stuff. Is there anything I can do or should do? Am I going to be on
some kind of blacklist? Is there some central agency I should notify?
Will it go away again on its own?
It comes in waves-- right now it's pretty bad, 3000 returns a day, or
more.

Hello Timothj,

Some free comments:
 [1] It depends, there is not much you can do about it unless the spam
is indeed generated by a system from your domain. There are ways you
can check to see if one of your PCs are "0wned". The simplest would be
to look at the headers of the bounced spam, searching for one of your
IP addresses (or host names) on them and look for patterns that would
indicate one of your systems is generating the messages. If so - fix
it right away and the bounces should go away (or get reduced greatly).
 [2] The people who run blacklists generally use the "received by"
headers and look backwards from "know good" sites to determine who is
really sending the spam. If your systems are not generating the spam,
you sould not be blacklisted. If one of your systems is generating the
spam, they may end up blacklisting you.
 [3] Certainly not unless you do get blacklisted. Then you need to
contact the blacklist organization after you clean up your systems.
 [4] Perhaps, but not sure. Remember that about 80% of the email on
the internet is spam.

  --Maniac

Thank you for your free comment, Maniac. That is very helpful.

timj

You can't do nothing about this. It's not like someone is actually
forging your domain on purpose. Usually internet worms make
"permutations" of the email addresses to get some new ones so they can
send themselves further on. I get like 3000 emails too per day. I even
get spam to many users on my domain that don't even exist...
Only think you could do is to e-mail the ISP of the computer(s) that
send the e-mail and report to their ISPs.