help!, bombarded with undelivered mail emails

[Andy]

I am being bombarded with emails addressed from internet mail delivery,
postmaster, mail administrator, mailer-daemon, mail delivery system etc the
subject being undelivered emails, delivery notification, mail system error,
etc etc. The thing is, i havnt even sent any of these emails in the first
place! Is someone using my email address and what can i do to stop these
emails which i am currently receiving at the rate of 200-300 per day!

Many thanks in advance,andy

 

[Mr.Clean]

I am being bombarded with emails addressed from internet mail delivery,
postmaster, mail administrator, mailer-daemon, mail delivery system etc the
subject being undelivered emails, delivery notification, mail system error,
etc etc. The thing is, i havnt even sent any of these emails in the first
place! Is someone using my email address and what can i do to stop these
emails which i am currently receiving at the rate of 200-300 per day!

Many thanks in advance,andy

Apparently, someone that has your address in their addressbook has a
trojan and it is using your email address as the sender in their spam.

The undeliverables are just returns of messages that the spam was
written to with bad adresses.

You can write a filter/rule to get rid of those very easily.

 

[Bruce Hagen]

Returned mail that was never sent:

This is coming from a virus infected computer that is using your address to
spoof the From field. It's very common. As of now, all you can do is delete
them.

And never use your real address when you post to a newsgroup. That is one of
the most popular places for Spammers to harvest addresses from.

Bruce Hagen
MS MVP - (IE/OE)
~IB-CA~

 

[Alias]

I am being bombarded with emails addressed from internet mail delivery,
postmaster, mail administrator, mailer-daemon, mail delivery system etc the
subject being undelivered emails, delivery notification, mail system error,
etc etc. The thing is, i havnt even sent any of these emails in the first
place! Is someone using my email address and what can i do to stop these
emails which i am currently receiving at the rate of 200-300 per day!

Many thanks in advance,andy

Nothing you can do about it except hit the delete key or change your email
address. Someone that has your email address in their address book got a
trojan or virus.

Alias

 

[Kerry Brown]

I am being bombarded with emails addressed from internet mail delivery,
postmaster, mail administrator, mailer-daemon, mail delivery system etc the
subject being undelivered emails, delivery notification, mail system error,
etc etc. The thing is, i havnt even sent any of these emails in the first
place! Is someone using my email address and what can i do to stop these
emails which i am currently receiving at the rate of 200-300 per day!

Many thanks in advance,andy

As others have mentioned it is most likely caused by another computer that
has a virus and is forging your email address. Another not as common
scenario is that your computer has been taken over by a spammer. If your
computer, particularly the Internet, seems slow you may want to check for
viruses and malware.

Kerry

 

[ANONYMOUS]

This is a deliberate ploy of spammers. The only way they can make you
read their emails is to falsify your email so that it reaches your
mailbox (otherwise spam filters could block it) and you will have no
choice but to read it out of curiosity!!!

They are always one step ahead of everybody!!

 

[Plato]

I am being bombarded with emails addressed from internet mail delivery,
postmaster, mail administrator, mailer-daemon, mail delivery system etc the
subject being undelivered emails, delivery notification, mail system error,
etc etc. The thing is, i havnt even sent any of these emails in the first
place! Is someone using my email address and what can i do to stop these
emails which i am currently receiving at the rate of 200-300 per day!

Not necessarily. You could have a trojan that is sending out emails from
your pc in the background and then you are receiving the bounced mail.
Many trojans have their own SMTP sender.

 

[N. Miller]

Andy wrote:

Not necessarily. You could have a trojan that is sending out emails from
your pc in the background and then you are receiving the bounced mail.
Many trojans have their own SMTP sender.

SMTP client, really; it connects to the domain MX server of the target
email address. And if it is a spammer Trojan on his computer, it would not
send bounce notices to his account. Why would something like that want to
draw attention to itself?

 

[N. Miller]

I am being bombarded with emails addressed from internet mail delivery,
postmaster, mail administrator, mailer-daemon, mail delivery system etc the
subject being undelivered emails, delivery notification, mail system error,
etc etc. The thing is, i havnt even sent any of these emails in the first
place! Is someone using my email address and what can i do to stop these
emails which i am currently receiving at the rate of 200-300 per day!

Many thanks in advance,andy

Welcome to the club! On June 1, 2003, I discovered a similar situation with
my Yahoo! Mail account. I had to set filters to dump messages from those
senders in the trash. It will pass; it is a spammer having forged your
email address as the sender in his spam run. It was three weeks before the
flood abated, and eight weeks until it turned to a trickle.

While a Swen-type virus could also cause it, I suspect it is more likely a
spammer; you generally would see something in the sender address, or
subject, if the cause was viral email.

If you know what to look for, you might even find a MailWasher bounce, or
three, in the lot. Telling you that the "user account does not exist". I
found four among my bounces; sent an email to them all. One even bounced my
email with MW; but decided to give up when I responded his second bounce!

All that you can do is ride it out. Use filters. If you are ambitious
enough to learn how to extract the encapsulated spam, and process that for
complaints to the originating mail service, and the hosting service of the
payload, you could mention "forgery" in your note to them. A shore, one
line, factual statement, "This email was apparently sent from one of your
user's computers using a forged email address as the sender"; that should
get somebody's attention. Even if the only thing that happens is that the
provider slaps the idiot's wrist, and says, "Don't ever forge an email
address again".

 

[Uncle Joe]

This may not be germane, but I recall reading (I
think it was an Symantec online document)
few years back that one way to defeat spammers
who used one's address book to send out messages
was to create a new address book entry with the
name "!000" (this places it at the front of one's
address book) and giving it no email address.

The theory was that when the offending program
tried to scan through your address book, it
couldn't get past the entry with no email address.

Have never had a problem (knock on wood) with
spamming and I do have an "!000" entry at the
front of my address book.

 

[Adam]

Me too! Happened today for the first time in 12 years.

I got the name and address of the person who owns the website that the SPAM
emails point to. Would it not be possible to take some action against the
site owner who is obviously involved in using illegal methods to promote his
site?

 

[Richard in AZ]

The method you propose is now an urban legend. It does not work.
Almost all spyware and virus programs that send mail from your computer use
their own unique smtp (outbound mail) program and would not be bothered with
a !000 address in your address book.
You might as well delete that address and clean up your address book.

 

[Colm]

Hello all

First posting here... I am trying to export a contact group to a few friends
so that they can just add the whole group with a few click to their address
book. Can this be done? I've tried a few time but each time I end up
exporting my whole address book.

Look forward to any replies

Regards

Colm

 

[Bruce Hagen]

Courtesy of Jim Pickering, MVP-Outlook Express

Create a "standalone" WAB file:
http://insideoe.tomsterdam.com/files/wab.htm#wabexe

Then open your default address book to the group desired and select all
member of the group and copy them to the clipboard (Ctrl+A selects all,
Ctrl+C copies them to the clipboard). Then open your "standalone" WAB file
and paste the contacts into that file (you will have to hit the Enter key to
OK each entry but it beats typing) and then either copy that wab file to a
floppy disc or export it as CSV file. Otherwise, folders and group neither
import, nor export.

 

[Uncle Joe]

Hadn't heard that. Thanks.

Got to hand to the spammers. They are some
smart dudes out there. Too bad they're not
working for Microsoft and Symantec and
the National Security Agency to resolve
spamming issues.

 

[Alias]

Hadn't heard that. Thanks.

Got to hand to the spammers. They are some
smart dudes out there. Too bad they're not
working for Microsoft and Symantec and
the National Security Agency to resolve
spamming issues.

None of those organizations can afford them. They busted a spammer a month
or so ago that was clearing 750,000 US dollars a month.

Alias

 

[Uncle Joe]

$750K a month?! I just discovered a new
career path. Thank you. (Smile.)

 

[Alias]

Um, the vacation clause is a bitch.

Alias

$750K a month?! I just discovered a new
career path. Thank you. (Smile.)