[::maroma::]

So I get about 30 SPAM emails per day. No biggie, Mail.app keeps them out of sight just fine. But I noticed something about 3 days ago that got me kinda worried. All of the sudden, about 95% of my SPAM emails looked like they were emails that I had sent that got sent back to me because of a bad address. But they were SPAM mails that I've never seen before. It was as if I had sent them, and now they are coming back.

This just happened out of the blue. Although my computer has been acting kinda strange lately (things like prefs getting reset and such). And I don't have anything set to bounce my SPAMs back to the sender or anything like that. I checked my rules for my SPAM filter. And I'm not getting any more SPAM than I normally do, which makes me think that it's not me.

So, is this just the spammers idea of being clever? Or am I somehow bouncing back SPAMs like crazy? Or did I get hacked?

Signs,
Kinda Worried a Little

P.S. - I hate spammers with every fiber of my being.

[The Placid Casual]

Originally posted by ::maroma:::
So I get about 30 SPAM emails per day. No biggie, Mail.app keeps them out of sight just fine. But I noticed something about 3 days ago that got me kinda worried. All of the sudden, about 95% of my SPAM emails looked like they were emails that I had sent that got sent back to me because of a bad address. But they were SPAM mails that I've never seen before. It was as if I had sent them, and now they are coming back.

This just happened out of the blue. Although my computer has been acting kinda strange lately (things like prefs getting reset and such). And I don't have anything set to bounce my SPAMs back to the sender or anything like that. I checked my rules for my SPAM filter. And I'm not getting any more SPAM than I normally do, which makes me think that it's not me.

So, is this just the spammers idea of being clever? Or am I somehow bouncing back SPAMs like crazy? Or did I get hacked?

Signs,
Kinda Worried a Little

P.S. - I hate spammers with every fiber of my being.

It sounds like someone is sending out spam with your email address as the return address...

When the Spam isn't delivered it gets returned to you and not the spammers.

It happened to me a few months back and caused endless hassle... I got 500+ returned emails in a about 2 days.

Unfortunately, there is not much you can do to stop it apart from shutting down the effected address...

Peace,

Marc

[aktive]

Its nothing to be worried about, it sounds like one of the Windows based mass mailing viruses. See the below thread for further details:

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.php?threadid=173167

[iWrite]

Don't worry -- same thing is happening to me.

By any chance do you have an eBay account? Might want to check up on it and make sure no one is using it.

I just ran Norton and have everything turned on. HOWEVER, I'm on the PC notebook and guess what? Norton alerted me that *someone* or *something* was trying to access the internet -- a notice popped up and told me. It asked me if I wanted to allow it and I said no.

I updated all the virus definitions and ran a virus scan and my computer isn't infected so it's probably nothing to be too concerned about.

[runningdog]

It's probably one of the many Micro$oft viruses that's gotten ahold of a friend's or family member's Outlook address book and is randomly trying to propagate itself by sending out email to random address from everyone in the address book. The trick is that the person who gets this odd email returned to them as undeliverable is supposed to poke around in the attachment that gets bounced back to see what was sent and then boom, you're infected.

[::maroma::]

Very interesting. Thanks for the info everyone! I feel better now. I have many PC using friends, my Mother being one. She has no clue about viruses, or blocking them for that matter. So I wouldn't doubt if it hit her.

Anyways, I hope I don't have to ditch my email account. It's my main .Mac account, and I love it. As a matter of fact, I NEED it. Well, here's to hoping.

Thanks again!

[DeepDish]

This happened to one of our domains, but the first part before the @ was a user we never created before. So our catch all e-mail was receiving over 1,000 AOL bounce backs a day.

I think a spammer was using our domain as the reply address.

That was over a year ago.

Yesterday, it started up again with two of our real accounts.

It is probably pc clients of ours that is affected by this new virus. I had no idea that this virus would send out e-mails with randomly picking the users address book as the reply address (I think I just read that in this thread, but I could be wrong.)

Regardless, this sucks. We are all mac based and this virus is going around and people are e-mail us telling us are macs are sending out e-mails that affected with this virus.

[philzilla]

read this. it covers the recent spamming