That makes me feel MUCH better! Making sure I understand you correctly. A spammer stole my email address and is sending out emails from their computer using it? There is no virus on my computer? They don't have access to my computer, just my email address?
Still isn't it odd that they are targeting oil and gas stocks?
By the way my old isp is earthlink.
I wonder if earthlink SOLD your email address to spammers. You might want to contact them and raise a little hell.
By the way my old isp is earthlink.
That's really interesting. I get several of those penny stock tips every day. I never received any spam until I switched to earthlink. Their spamblocker catches all of them, but I still have to sift through them for any legit email caught by mistake. It's likely that the spammers are targeting earthlink because of their size, and you (and me) just got caught in the fray.
It is still a good idea to check out your computer with a anti-spyware, anti-viral software package, but from what you've described, the most likely culprit are international spammers who are sending the emails from their own computers.
All that's needed to send out spam is an SMTP server. These are the equivalent of mail carriers. Once a message is accepted by an SMTP server for delivery, it is sent on its way to the destination address. If delivery should fail, the SMTP network returns the failed letter to the return address instead of to the point of origin.
A person with a tech background could look at the bounced messages and trace the message back to the point of origin. You could to.
1) Open your mail client.
2) Find one of the bounced messages.
3) Highlight the message by clicking on it once.
4) Right-click on the message, or if you're using a Mac with a one button mouse, Control-Click on the message.
5) You want to view all the message headers, so select from the pop-up menu the option most likely to show you the complete message headers. The message headers are normally invisible when reading your email, but they contain the routing information for a message.
6) Once the message is expanded, and you're viewing the message headers, look for information indicating the point of origin. It will sometimes look like this:
Received: from the-spammer.smtp-server.com (the-spammer.smtp-server.com [555.555.555.555]) by your-email-server.your-isp.com (8.13.4/8.13.4) with ESMTP id k4OEkVG3013134 for (your-email@your-isp.com); Wed, 24 May 2006 09:46:42 -0500
With most spammers, the best you'll be able to do is track it to the SMTP server they used to send the email from. There are a number of these email servers that strip out the point of origin, or allow a local account connection so that the point of origin appears to be the email server.
However, if the spammer uses a commercial server to send their message, the message will contain more than one "Received:" tag, and the second one should note the point of origin, as an IP address. The IP address can be compared against your external IP address to see if you were the point of origin, or if you want to locate the original sender, using a traceroute program (Google: traceroute), then you can narrow down the sender to the city of origin, node, and ISP. Of course, the sender might be a slave machine that the spammer hacked, and may not be the spammer but is instead a tool, at which point tracking the spammer beyond that point would require either hacking the machine yourself, or getting the ISP that machine is hooked up to to do the trace back on connections into the machine.
But I hope this gives you a picture. You could probably also try and google information on tracing emails to their point of origin.
This is common, and it is no fault of yours nor is it any problem of your computer nor of Earthlinks. Just delete the messages. Nothing useful you can do about them nor learn from them.
Now as to whether there is a virus on your computer, that's an entirely separate question, regarding which this spam provides no clue, either for or against.