[nivrip]

Received an email from a well known friend. A lot of the text was gobbledegook and there was an attachment, which I opened before I had time to think. Turned out to be an advert for a well known blue tablet for men.

Replied to the friend who denied sending it (and i believe her) who thinks she has had a virus which has sent this email to all her contacts.

There does not appear to be anything in my Kaspersky File to indicate a virus but is there any more I can do to check this?

[Ian]

It may not be that the e-mail contained a virus, but that your friend either has a virus or has had their e-mail account hacked. Does your friend have a webmail account?

I've had a few e-mails from friends that have been spam, e-mailed to everyone in their contact list - sometimes with spoofed addresses of other contacts. Turns out it was their webmail account that was hacked.

[muckshifter]

It's easy to spoof an email because SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) lacks authentication.

The header of the email message often contains a complete history of the "hops" the message has taken to reach its destination. Information in the headers, such as the "Received:" and "Message-ID" information, in conjunction with your mail delivery logs, should help you to determine how the email reached your system.

If, however, the abuser connected directly to the SMTP port on your system, it may not be possible for you to identify the source of the activity.

http://ask-leo.com/someones_sending_...stop_them.html