Thread: auto email

You may already know this, but what has happened is that somebody who has your address in their address book, and is running Windows, and (possibly) has inadequate virus protection, has got infected with a virus that has turned their computer into a zombie which is sending out reams of spam using a variety of return addresses taken from their address book. I know, I got a burst of them (returned, address not known) a week or so ago. Probably the spam merchants that got busted in the US about a month ago are back in business.

John

Yep,John. Funny thing is most have .ru addresses.Makes it hard to read reports

Originally Posted by JDNSW

You may already know this, but what has happened is that somebody who has your address in their address book, and is running Windows, and (possibly) has inadequate virus protection, has got infected with a virus that has turned their computer into a zombie which is sending out reams of spam using a variety of return addresses taken from their address book. I know, I got a burst of them (returned, address not known) a week or so ago. Probably the spam merchants that got busted in the US about a month ago are back in business.

John

Umm...it's not necessarily a Windows related thing at all...

What's happening is a spammer is spoofing your address and declaring you as the sender of the message (doesn't need an infected machine to do that). When the messages hit the intended recipients (people in Russian organisations) their anti-spam systems are sending the undeliverable notices to the 'sender' which they think is you.

If you search for your email address through Google, you'll probably find it listed somewhere (ie a forum profile) and the spammers usually pick them up by bot-crawling those sorts of things.

I work in IT at a Uni and we get hit by thousands of these messages. We have Unix email systems, Exchange email, as well as Mac, Linux and Windows PC's and everyone gets hit by these. The only way to stop it is for the system admins in Russia to reconfigure their anti-spam systems to stop sending replies and just drop messages tagged as spam.

If you plan to filter the notices, I'll just add a word of caution. If you configure a filter to delete these types of messages you will also loose all legitmate undeliverable notices. The best option is to filter them to a special folder and check them from time to time for legitimate mail.

We're also getting bombarded with e-mails, with the sender being our own e-mail address, so far I have altered our mail account password, they stopped for 3 days, but alas they started again today. Our service provider wants a clean install of the OS next.

Do I ignore the problem and hope that the Police don't kick the door in looking for the supplier of non-prescription drugs or keep deleting e-mails (175 for December and counting)

Decisions, decisions
Glenn

Glenn,
It probably has nothing to do with your computer at all - your address probably came from someone else's address book who has an infected computer, or possibly as delta-farce suggests, from your address being listed somewhere either publicly or where security is poor.

While it is possible that your computer is the one involved (which is what your ISP is suggesting, this is relatively unlikely. But the only way of proving it is a clean install (although even this is not a guarantee if you then restore the infected email!), or as with the original poster, leaving it switched off for a week or so and seeing if this interrupts the flow.

In a few of these cases I have been even able to guess which group of my correspondents the address came from because the label attached to the address is slightly different.

John

Originally Posted by JDNSW

Glenn,

In a few of these cases I have been even able to guess which group of my correspondents the address came from because the label attached to the address is slightly different.

John

I sent a few e-mails to my ISP, they looked into it and said it looked like it possibly could have, maybe was, possibly wasn't but don't want to rule out .... it went on an on.

All very annoying
Think I'll make a message rule and ignore them.

Glenn

I use "MailWasher Pro" as my email filter. Magic.
It just downloads the first few lines of each email from the server and I can tick a box to delete it off the server. Has excellent spam filters you can set up. Most of the spam mail I don't even see, it automatically delets off the server based on the filters I set.

Agree what people have said about spam people/robots getting email addresses off forum posts (never put your email in a post) and from other peoples mail programs.

Originally Posted by miky

I use "MailWasher Pro" as my email filter. Magic.

I'll look into it.

Glenn