WAY OT: shanghaied e-mail address?

Jay Gladwell wrote on 5/30/2004, 1:47 PM
I'm Norton Anti-virus which updates itself on a regular basis. Everynight at 2 a.m. the program scans the disks and notifies me of any viruses it may have found. So far, after three years, it's not found any, except for the occasional e-mail which it automatically deletes. I also have a firewall installed.

Recently, my spam program, MailShield, gets messages that state a certain e-mail from my address was undeliverable--an e-mail I never sent!

I'm confident that I don't have any e-mail viruses and with the firewall I'm confident that there are remote users. However, can someone use another person's e-mail address when sending out their own spams?

What really ticks me off is this is my "professional" e-mail address, the one I've given only to professional, video-related sites. I am conifdent some moron has sold my address to these other slim balls!

J--

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 5/30/2004, 1:54 PM
Your email address can EASILY be used as a spoof address by spammers. I doubt anyone has sold your address. I regularly get mail from myself, to myself, on an account that is used exclusively for membership in a couple of non-commercial, video related sites like the SCVUG and a couple others. If often comes from other people's addy books, not your own.
riredale wrote on 5/30/2004, 1:57 PM
Okay, so the Norton program checks for viri, and the Mailshield program blocks spam. Do you have the third leg of the stool, a firewall that handles both inbound and outbound communications? Zonealarm is very popular and it's free. The current xp firewall (which is turned off by default) only works on inbound stuff, so if a trojan somehow got by the virus program it could be sending out stuff without getting flagged.

The next version of xp (sp2) is supposed to have a dual-direction firewall.
Chienworks wrote on 5/30/2004, 1:58 PM
Nope .... not your fault at all. And noone has "stolen" your address. You're the victim of a virus on someone else's computer.

Presumably since this is your professional email address, you've used it to correspond with other people. One or more of these other people has probably saved your email address in their address book after receiving your email. One of them has now been infected with a virus that uses the list of addresses in their address book not only to send out new copies of itself and spam, but also as the From: address on these emails. That way the people receiving the emails/viruses/spams won't know where they really came from and will complain to the wrong person, allowing the abuse on the infected machine to continue longer.

Typical spammer-scum technique, especially since they're hiring the virus writers to do their bidding now.

There's not much you can do about it unless you get lots of samples that all include complete routing information in the headers and you get good at deciphering it. If it gets bad enough you may consider abandoning your email address for another one.
danstine wrote on 5/30/2004, 2:05 PM
Based on what you've said, I'm fairly positive that your system is fine. It's entirely too easy for scumbags to use sendmail on a unix system, or to script into any "send a friend a link" on a public website that has one of those forms that you type in the to and from e-mail address, and the form is processed by sendmail, or whatever the ms equivalent is. From what I understand, there are forms of worms and viruses and such that harvest e-mail addresses and then use those e-mail addresses as the from in spam.

I've taken to the tack of generating a lot of throw away e-mail addresses. Particularly ones that I use on the internet, even in commerical site forms. The biggest suprise I got was when I got an undeliverable e-mail message on a new throw away account that I had just used to register some high-end photo equipment.

The proliferation of spammers, worm, virus and all that crud makes it next to impossible for even the most diligent to keep their systems clean.

Just think how productive our society could be if all those folks concentrated on something beneficial. Ok, end of rant. I'll go back to trying to figure out how to make a spam proof "tell-a-friend" form for our website ...

Dianne
Jay Gladwell wrote on 5/30/2004, 2:23 PM
Thanks to everyone for your replies and the information!

J--
kameronj wrote on 5/30/2004, 2:24 PM
I remember when I first got a rash of undeliverable e-mails that looked like they came from me to a bunch of people I don't know and never sent to.

Considering that all of my e-mails run on other people's servers, (or are webbased) I knew for sure it wasn't my PC. But I still frantically tried to contact a bunch of folks to 'splain that it wasn't me.

Until I realized it was just the scum bags mirroring my e-mail addy. and it was just the virus at work on someone elses system.

It is too bad that these idiots don't have somethign better to do with their time instead of making things worse for the rest of us.

But that is the way that is is.....for now.