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

Fred Holder wrote:
snip
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.

I suspect that it's someone who has both our addresses and doesn't
have their vrus files updated.

Dave in Fairfax
--
Dave Leader
reply-to doesn't work
use:
daveldr at att dot net
American Association of Woodturners
http://www.woodturner.org
Capital Area Woodturners
http://www.capwoodturners.org/
PATINA
http://www.Patinatools.org/

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

In message , Millers
writes
Fred Holder wrote:
I've been being bombarded with e-mail messages that say they are
returned mail
SNIP
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

I agree with Kevin, the same has happened to me, somebody took my e-mail
address from somewhere and is now using it to send the same as you are
getting plus other rubbish, so far I estimate I have received in excess
of 10k return mails and junk, I have now set my reject list to reject
everything without a certain name in the header, it works a dream. It
only takes a couple of seconds to reject over 200 junk mails (which I am
still receiving daily). I refuse to change my e-mail address just to
suit these morons.

Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year

Bob `S`
--
Robert Strudwick

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.

There are a couple of tricks that will make it very difficult for a spammer
to 'mine' your website, but still let people email you hassle0free. One that
I use is:

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/emailriddler/index.htm It has the added
benefit of inserting what you want into the subject field.

Also, spammers mine the publically available Domain Name registries. On
yours you use You can change it, but must put in a valid
email account (they will check). What I did was create a Yahoo account (that
I never check) and use it on my websites. Dan