Fred Holder wrote:
I've been being bombarded with e-mail messages that say they are returned mail
and the complete message is in the attachment. I don't trust these sort of
messages since they are coming in to my receiving mail address. Returned mail
goes back to the sending address. In my case they are different. That is the
first clue. Finally, I received one that was supposedly returned from Woodcraft
and had a text message titled "Woodcraft News". Since this message followed the
format of all of the couple of dozen I have received in the last couple of days,
I decided to forward it back to Woodcraft. What do you know, my virus checker
kicked in and said there was a virus in the message. I deleted the message and
emptied my trash, but thought the warning should be passed on. I don't know if
someone with my e-mail address in their address book has this virus or if this
is some person with a sick mind targeting my e-mail address.

Fred Holder
http://www.fholder.com

It used to be that a virus would look in a person's address book to
forge the from address. Anymore though, it's more likely that someone's
computer has been "owned" by a spammer. That is, the spammers are often
the one's writing viruses, which turn a users home computer into a 'spam
bot'. Most responsible email admins have configured their servers to
disallow sending email if you're not their customer so the spammers
create viruses that install themselves on home users machines and use
the spam lists as the from address.

Doubt that anybody is targeting you. One thing that might help in the
long haul is to make sure you don't have your email address on your web
site in a normal format. You can spell it out or there's various ways
to disguise it, but the spammers will harvest email addresses from web
sites ensuring that you're perpetually on their lists.

Glad you're using antivirus - important to keep it up to date on
Windows. (Sure is nice running Linux and not having to worry about all
that anymore!)


....Kevin
--
Kevin Miller
http://www.alaska.net/~atftb
Juneau, Alaska