email spies?

pantosj

pantosj

Registered
Here's one for you guys. I keep getting these "mail delivery failed" messages from various mailer daemons for messages I haven't sent to emails I've never heard of. The last one was sent to 6mp4py@btopenworld.com

I did a little googling into this and found that btopenworld is British Telecom. I've also received these messages for aol email addresses.

Even weirder, I hadn't sent any emails to anyone on the days these mails were apparently sent...according to my sent folder on mac mail.

Is this spyware? A virus? Paradimensional weirdness? :eek:
 
It sounds like someone's using your address as the return address to send spam. If someone puts your email address in the return header and sends out 10,000 emails, and 500 of those bounce, you're going to get 500 failed mail notices. I'm not sure what else you can do, except know that hindsight is 20/20 and try to keep your email address off of sites, Usenet, and other places spammers can harvest it.
 
Many mass-mailer viruses (for the Windows platform) fake sender addresses just as Arden describes. They collect these addresses from the Outlook address books, sent and recieved mail, docs on the hard drive and cached internet pages. That explains why Arden's advice is quite wise and worth following.

I always search on the text of the message at Symantec, here:
http://www.symantec.com/search_home.html
just to see if it is virus-generated.
 
But the thing you describe is actually a clever virus delivery. The formality of the post, and the wording of the body will goad many an unsuspecting user to open the zip file attached and that exploits a bug/feature in winzip to run viral code.

Don't open any attachments that you don't know were coming to you.
 
Um, good advice, Paul, but where does Pantosj mention anything about attachments?
 
I had exactly the same thing about a month ago. Not only undelivered mail but reply's from people asking me why I have mailed them (when I had not).
After about a week it just stopped happening and now all is OK

Strange indeed!!!!
 
garymum4d said:
After about a week it just stopped happening and now all is OK

Strange indeed!!!!
Click to expand...
Not too strange. PC anti-virus software caught up with the particular virus that had infected a machine that had your email address in the address book or on the hard drive somewhere and "disinfected" it. Or maybe the PC is still infected but the virus has shifted to using someone else's email address as the supposed originator of the email. The moral of this is don't exchange email with any PC users. Remember friends don't let friends use PCs. ;)
 
My cousin had this problem - one day he clicked "Check for new mail" and Outlook Express proceeded to try and download over 5000 emails!

Guess who had to sort it out for him? :(
 
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