Newsweek’s Steven Levy has an interesting story this week about how his domain name, stevenlevy.com, has been hijacked by spammers touting penny stocks:
My domain name is being used as a phony return address by spammers wishing to hide the real origin of their come-ons. I discovered this when I suddenly began receiving dozens of bounced e-mail messages and out-of-office replies referencing mail I hadn’t sent. (My ISP forwards all stevenlevy.com mail directly to me.) Sometimes the original message was sent along, and to my horror, each one was a carnival-barker plea to buy the penny stock of some obscure enterprise, like the tiny company with some mineral rights in British Columbia that was shifting its focus to entertainment and media opportunities in China.
The same thing happened to me in the past 10 days, with porn e-mails going out under my name, a fact I discover when the bounce messages come back to me.
Ironic coincidence? Or a malevolent attempt by spammers to target technology-based domains? I don’t know. But I do know that it’s annoying, and if I owned a business that depended on e-mail for my customers to make purchases and receive support the effects of having my domain name used this way could be catastrophic.
Ed Bott 
It has happened several times to each of my three personal domains and has happened at least twice a year to my corporate domain for the last five or six years.
I’ve figured it’s just a part of dealing with life on the internet. But the good news is that more and more mail servers are doing a better job of filtering it, that’s good news for your good domain name, but bad news for the amount of email bounces you get.
I had this last year and for days I was getting streams of bounced messages for some pharmacy site in Canada. They eventually stopped, thankfully.
I think they’re just randomly selecting from DNS or something – I used to get a lot of bounces sent to random-name@myhostpart.myisp.co.uk. I say ‘used to’ because in the end I got so fed up with it that I went to the email control panel website offered by my ISP and set it to reject all Delivery Status Notification messages. Now if I send email to someone and they don’t get it, I won’t know about it, but at least I won’t get over 100 junk messages a week.