JonathanChance

Hey people, I have been getting a whole shitload of failure notice emails from mailer daemons and mail system administrators. The weird thing is, I have not sent out any eamils for about a week and I recognize none of the adresses that these messages clame I sent emails to. A number of these emails have attatchments. Now is something fucked up with my hotmail account, is this a new way that asshat 1337 h4X0rs and scriptkiddies are using to get me to download virii, or is this just anoter evil trick that the spammers are using to get me on their mailing lists


Here's what one of these thing looks like:


I seriously and most humbly apologize for using leetspeak in this post.

ju'iblex

sounds to me like someone is using your address as their "Sender" header for spam emails, and you're copping the flak for it.

excreationist

You might have the win32 klez virus... it makes you send attachments that are about 100kb to other people... or it could be another email related virus... anyway, you should download the latest updates for your virus scanning program and do a full scan of your computer.

lisarea

I don't think you can get klez on a hotmail account, can you?

Anyway, like ju'iblex says, it does sound like you're just in the From: line on some spam. Happens to me all the time. There's not a hell of a lot you can do realistically.

If you do decide to track them down, make sure any attachments you open aren't executables.

AmbiguousUbiquity

Hi Johnathan.....

I found this website for you on the Norton Securites page. It sounds like you have the sobig virus. Anyway, if you want to read more about it, here's the page:

Norton AntiVirus

Autonemesis

You don't have the Sobig.F worm. But someone who does have it, has your email address in their addressbook, or a cached webpage in their temp folder, or in some other file on their computer. The worm found it, and is spoofing your email address to spread itself around.

This situation is not helped by mail administrators who have their anti-virus send warnings back to the sender that their message was blocked. People should know by now that the apparent sender is not likely to be the actual sender, and they should turn these features off.

The messages from mailer-daemon, however, are proper and not really avoidable. If the worm picks a bad email address to try and send itself to, it'll bounce, and whoever was spoofed will get the bounce message. You can't really disable that without getting rid of a useful fuction, namely failed delivery notification. Not having that would suck worse than getting all these notices for emails you didn't send.

excreationist

If you use outlook to check your hotmail account (like I do) then you can.

lisarea

Well, if you not only use both Outlook and Hotmail, but you use them TOGETHER, well, you deserve whatever you get!

(Just kidding. I just dig playing the smugly superior anti-Microsoft guy from time to time. Thank you for your kind indulgence.)

excreationist

lisarea:
I signed up with hotmail before it was taken over by Microsoft though! And outlook express is just the easiest way for me to deal with emails. (I can't be bothered finding something else) I'm trying to avoid supporting their .net thing though... I might switch to yahoo in the future... (not sure if they have free pop3 type access) hopefully Microsoft won't take them over...

Secular Pinoy

Does Hotmail have pop3 access? I haven't really checked out my hotmail account recently, it gets too much spam. My Yahoo account receives far fewer ones, so it's ok. There was free pop3 access, but they started charging people for it ($ 19+ a year I think) over a year ago.