[Arther]

Howdy all,

I am at my wits end with trying to figure out why my wifes email account get between 200-300 mail deliver failure emails a day. My wife doesn't know any of these email accounts.....

This all started @ a month ago out of the blue. I have scanned the PC with MSE, superantispywere, malwarebyts, CCleaner, made sure i was up to date on my windows updates, dumbed cookies, disk cleanup, defrag you name it i have tried to figure out this problem. Other than your occasional tracking cookie no virus shows up on any scan.


Any idea why this is happending, but most importantly how can i stop it?????

It only happend on her email account via outlook not mine.

I run:

Windows 7 64bit and Outlook 2007

[smax013]

Arther, on 02 July 2012 - 03:02 PM, said:

Howdy all,

I am at my wits end with trying to figure out why my wifes email account get between 200-300 mail deliver failure emails a day. My wife doesn't know any of these email accounts.....

This all started @ a month ago out of the blue. I have scanned the PC with MSE, superantispywere, malwarebyts, CCleaner, made sure i was up to date on my windows updates, dumbed cookies, disk cleanup, defrag you name it i have tried to figure out this problem. Other than your occasional tracking cookie no virus shows up on any scan.


Any idea why this is happending, but most importantly how can i stop it?????

It only happend on her email account via outlook not mine.

I run:

Windows 7 64bit and Outlook 2007

When you start to get lots of questionable email delivery failure notices for things that you did not send, then there is a good chance that someone is "spoofing" your email address when they send out spam email messages. It is VERY easy to "spoof" an email address (i.e. make it look like an email message came from someone that it did not come from...just like if you sent a snail mail, aka "real", letter but wrote your neighbor's return address on it).

And you don't even need to be infected with anything. If you have a "common" email ID, then it is easy to guess and spammer will likely guess it. What I mean is lets say someone's name is Dave Williams (complete random example) and thus chooses to use dwilliams as his email ID (i.e. dwilliams@somedomain.com). So, the email ID is a first initial and (common) last name...something VERY easy to guess. So, spammers will guess such simple IDs and use them as their spoof address...and then Dave gets bombarded with email bounce messages.

If this is what is happening, then there is not a darn thing you can do other than 1) live with it or 2) change your email address. If you do change the email address, then change it to something less "common" (i.e. DO NOT use first initial last name) if you want to reduce the changes of this happening again. Obviously, the downside of a more complex email address is that it is harder for you and others to remember.

This post has been edited by smax013: 02 July 2012 - 04:07 PM

[LincolnSpector]

Hi, Arther.

Another possibility is that your wife's email address has been hacked. Have her change her password.

And another: A great deal of spam is sent out from infected PCs, spoofing addresses from on the PC's hard drive. So she may have a friend with an infected PC.

Lincoln