Posted on 04/17/2009 9:19:17 PM PDT by GATOR NAVY
Today I have received probably 15 spam messages using multiple variations of "failed mail delivery" as the sender and/or subject. No idea what they want because I didn't open them.
My hunch is that some spam bot spoofed your email address. When it fails to send a message the failure reply is going to you instead of the spam bot.
Right click on the message in your mail program. Look at who it came from. If you don’t know the person... delete it.
That’d be my guess too. Really annoying.
#2 most likely
When it happened to me it eventually went away, but yea really annoying for about a week.
Crap I didn’t even think of that. It’s a lycos.com account.
Yeah I never open spam.
I had kiddie pornographers spoof me twice in the past. It is extremely annoying. You’ll soon be receiving hate mail from those who actually received the spam saying things like “you are sick” and “I hope you go to prison and die!”
If you are lucky, the spammer is careless and has left a trail to follow - either through the email header information, or the site in the spam email. Do a “whois” on both and you may find an administrative contact. I was able to send a “cease and desist” the first time it happened to me. The company was out of the UK and promptly moved on to a less technical savvy victim.
The second time they were very good. Multiple proxies and they had used identity theft to set up their kiddie porn site. The poor woman I called in Kansas was in tears that her identity had been stolen for this purpose. I wasn’t the first to call her.
In both cases, I contacted the FBI with the email header information.
Good luck!
Also I check out who the messages are from in my ISP’s web mail interface before downloading them. That way no risk to my system if there is a questionable one I want to check out.
Everything else I delete before I ever download them to my email program.
I still had two of the messages in my spam box so I went ahead and opened them since it appears they are legitimate failure to deliver messages. There is is a lot of info there in the header but I’m not really sure how to read it. It looks like they are being sent from France. At least the subjects were “normal” spam-some arthritis cure and a zinc supplement-no kiddie porn.
I had this happen to me through a comcast address. I was urged to inform comcast of what was happening so that they would not suspend my account, thinking that I was sending the spam if enough complaints were lodge against me.
Spam, its whats for breakfast.
The term for this is “backscatter”.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.