Undeliverable emails, new type of spam?

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johnelliott

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Anyone else been getting these, yards of emails purporting to be messages from email systems telling me they can't deliver the mail I'm supposed to have sent? Which of course I haven't. Last time I had this was when I had a virus, now however I've got a good anti virus system which is regularly updated, so I don't believe I have a virus.
My ISP has started identifying most of these as spam, but what I'm not sure of is what the originators are getting out of the exercise unless it's just the nuisance they cause?

John
 
John, we've had this problem for the last couple of months at work. The email tends to come in two forms:

1. Undelivered mail which, of course, you haven't sent in the first place.

2. Emails supposedly coming from reputable sources which have included the HSE and recently even genuine contacts.

The one major giveaway is the fact that they all seem to have an attachment of 45k, which a colleague opened in a moment of weakness only to find it contained numerous dialers and who knows how many porn sites. It took me hours to rid the damn things from the system. Now as soon as we spot the attachment we delete the message without hesitation.

Karl
 
'Nother favorite seems to be the [RE] prefix followed by a person's name; dubious pharmecuticals await within and there seems to be an almost inevitable trojan horde too. Then there is the phishing scam of allegedly "checking your bank details" by a banking outfit you've almost heard of, great way to lose dosh.

Why, oh why can't the brilliant geeks employed by ISP's write macros, routines or filters to weed out these dammed pests "at source"?
 
yep I got a load of these messages. Luckily my spam filter picked it up
 
John

Are you running an anti spyware programme? I was getting all that rubbish up till last week when I installed Spy Sweeper and found out my computer was riddled with adware and it detected a phishing trojan horse.

I have the full Norton Internet Security and NAV didn't pick it up, even after doing the online virus check but Norton Help told me that they don't do an anti-spyware/adware component yet (they are working on one).

Anyway, the upshot is I deleted all the junk out of my machine and within 3 days the emails dwindled away to nothing.

HTH
 
Anyone who doesn't want to pay for their anti-spyware program might like to download Ad-Aware for free. It's very highly regarded by my geeky friends.

Gill
 
John

What you've fallen victim to is where the spammer has substituted there email 'from' address with your own address - gleaned from wherever these ***** get their email addresses from. They then send out the spam but when it hits anyones computer that has a decent anti-spam filter it will get sent back with an 'undeliverable' or similar message. Since the spam purports to come from you then you get the 'undeliverable' message.

Some ISPs (Demon for instance) give you the option to filter out these 'undeliverable' messages at the Demon mail server before it reaches you. The only downside is that you won't get a genuine 'undeliverable' email.

To combat spam (or at least easily filter it out) I can thoroughly recommend SpamBayes . You train it on what spam you are receiving and it learns as it goes along. I use it on the PC that I backup my emails to. Periodically I will fire up the PC and download the last weeks emails (including spam). It downloads all the emails from my ISP mail server and it's quite impressive to watch the program as it goes through the inbox.. pulling out the spam and suspect spam and automatically filing them into a couple of folders (or automatically deleting them..the choice is yours). Only works with Outlook .


Roger
 
Roger Sinden":3i4ds9fe said:
What you've fallen victim to is where the spammer has substituted there email 'from' address with your own address - gleaned from wherever these ***** get their email addresses from.
I think it's actually a virus that combs the infected machine for addresses and uses undeliverable mail messages as one of the ways to get you to open the email. I did identify which one it was when I had this a couple of weeks ago, but I forget which one it is.

Just fwiw, Scott, I've found "Avast!" and "AVG Free", both free A/V programs, seem to do a much better job than Norton.

Cheers, Alf
 
Alf":seltfhg6 said:
Roger Sinden":seltfhg6 said:
What you've fallen victim to is where the spammer has substituted there email 'from' address with your own address - gleaned from wherever these ***** get their email addresses from.
I think it's actually a virus that combs the infected machine for addresses and uses undeliverable mail messages as one of the ways to get you to open the email. I did identify which one it was when I had this a couple of weeks ago, but I forget which one it is.

Alf, I think that you might be confusing one strain of virus with another :wink: . There are some viruses that exhibit the characteristics that you give but when they infect a machine they email their viral package to addresses gleaned from the address book. The viral package is sent as an attachment with some sort of 'hook' title to get you to open it.

Undeliverable messages usually don't contain an attachment and are sent as I explained in my original post. I know for certain that the example I gave is valid since I receive quite a few 'message undeliverables' with (a) the same title and content and (b) from people that I do not know...and so there is no reason why they should have my address in their address book.

Roger
 
Just fwiw, Scott, I've found "Avast!" and "AVG Free", both free A/V programs, seem to do a much better job than Norton.

Thanks Alf. I don't know much about it but I'm not overly impressed with Norton!

PS: How do I get that to say "Alf wrote" like everyone else does??
 
Scott":2vsq097h said:
PS: How do I get that to say "Alf wrote" like everyone else does??

You mean like that? :eek:

Just use the 'quote' button on the top right of the post you want to quote. :D
 
Doh! I think I'm getting senile! :oops: :roll:

Thanks Dave
 
johnelliott":2izzq4ur said:
My ISP has started identifying most of these as spam, but what I'm not sure of is what the originators are getting out of the exercise unless it's just the nuisance they cause?

John

Hi John,

Best bet? Get yourself a throwaway email account with Yahoo.co.uk and then abandon it when the spam gets really bad.

Or you could start using Gmail. Their spam filter is really good. PM me if you need an invite.
 
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