You've been spoofed. Your email address has been used by a commercial spammer in the
Sender field, who probably has an outdated mailing list CD of half a million email
addresses. Email addresses are as transitory as phone numbers. Say only 40,000 of those
addresses on the list are no longer valid email addresses, then over time, you will have
40,000 messages bounced back to you as undeliverable, even though you personally haven't
sent the original messages. But, there's more: What about the couple of hundred thousand
messages that got through to valid email addresses on the list, and are now on the systems
of strangers,some of whom catch viruses/worms which distribute your email address to
others, and then the bounce backs really start to snowball. It's a no win situation.
After I started getting a couple of hundred bounced messages a day, the only recourse was
to change my email address.
In order to prevent this situation from happening again, make sure you're using a decent
firewall. Zone Alarm standard the FREE version will do. Get a FREE hotmail account, and
use the Hotmail email address when registering anything online, or posting to the news
groups (spammers also harvest addresses from news groups like this one, so add extra
characters to your email address for your news group posts, see my address for an example)
or when a web page requests an email address. So, if that address gets spoofed, you can
easily get a new Hotmail address. The Hotmail will bounce backs won't be in the Inbox of
your primary ISP email account. Hotmail also has a decent spam filter. Also, be careful
whom you give your email address to once you get it changed. If you know that certain
people you do email with aren't tech savvy, and don't use firewalls, and open attachments
when they shouldn't, give them your Hotmail account email address.
