Helpppp

[louiselux]

So I keep getting all these delivery notification status emails to addresses I haven't emailed. I checked both my pc and my laptop for viruses and trojans and things, but nothing shows up. Googling hasn't really helped me understand what's happening either - unless someone is using my email address to send spam. Huh. Which sounds likely.

Comments

[scribblemoose]

I've been getting those lately. They're just spam.

Annoying as hell, though. >.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Thanks - they really are. Grr.

[graycastle.livejournal.com]

I had that happen to me a couple of years ago, and soon afterwards started getting hundreds of emails from people saying "STOP SENDING ME THIS SPAM" etc. You might want to change your email password, which, in my case, resolved the problem.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Oh dear. I'll try that, thanks.

[shirochan.livejournal.com]

I think it's one of those automated spam bots. That infiltrates your email and starts sending people spam mail with you as the sender. I usually just delete those when I get them. Though the suggestion of changing your password sounds like a good one. :D

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Or they infiltrate someone else's address book and start sending spam as if from the addresses there. It's not necessarily your own system that's compromised.

[hungry-worm.livejournal.com]

Seconding. I know some viruses work like that, infiltrating someone's address book and sending out emails with fake senders (from within said address book), because I get return mails occasionally, too. Only that I'm on a mac and the virus/worm/trojan in question wouldn't work here. ;)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Thirding. I occasionally get spates of notifications exactly like that, and the reason I know there couldn't possibly have been anyone in my account and that they were spoofing the email address is that the addresses of mine that they were using were aliases - inboxes that don't exist but are forwarded to another inbox I own. There is no possible way to send email from those addresses; thus the bot scraped 'em from the Web or someone else's address book.

I use aliases for spam control, mostly - when I have to register for a webpage, I tend to use [nameofwebsite]spam@telophase.net as the email address. Everything sent to [anything]@telophase.net forwards to my real email address, so I know what site is selling the emails/compromised/spamming etc., and I can filter them into a spam folder if necessary.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Yes! That's what happening to me - spoof inboxes that are forwarded to others of mine.

That's really useful advice about aliases, actually. Thank you :)

[the_rck]

Changing your password may help, but in my experience, it usually doesn't. It's quite possible for spam senders to lie about the originating address in such a way that they don't need access to your account. Such things happen fairly often with the university I used to work for. That is, the spammers will send out messages with hundreds of recipients and make them look like they come from one of the recipients (which is just plain vicious given that sending spam like that is grounds for being fired or expelled).

The only thing that actually helped when it happened to me, years ago, was to change my e-mail address.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I am scared of having to do that, but I suppose I might have to at some point. Woe. :(

[toscas-kiss.livejournal.com]

Yeah, me too (or three or something!). It's verra verra annoying! But not much you can do. It's like all those fake eBay and bank notices you get, except some jerkoff is pretending to be you. I can't see the fun value to it myself, but then some people seriously need to get a life. Blah. :-P

Hey, cocktails & dinner sometime! You and M interested?

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Yay, yes indeed! That would be excellent!

[toscas-kiss.livejournal.com]

Cool! This weekend and that of the 31st is out for me, but otherwise whenever would be good for you?

[vom-marlowe.livejournal.com]

Probably spam. The best spam filter I have is in gmail. Do you have gmail? (If not, would you like to? I've got plenty of invites.)

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

I have gmail actually, but thank you for the offer. Maybe I should start to use it as my primary account. Hmmm.

[kanzenhanzai.livejournal.com]

There's not much you can do since it's more than likely that a spammer's stolen just the spelling of your email address rather than hacked into your account - Yahoo! email address/groups users in particular seem to have this problem :(

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Especially if the part before the @ is a word or phrase in the dictionary, or a name - many times spambots just go through a giant word list and use that to generate email addresses from a domain name - aardvark@domain,com, albatross@domain.com, adam@domain.com, asmith@domain.com, barbara@domain.com, etc.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

I think this really must be the case, because I'm pretty certain I've cleaned my system thoroughly.