I’ve just moved across country. The first chance that I had to check my email I found out I had 81 emails from people I’ve never heard of saying “mail undeliverable because of computer virus” or the like. Does this mean that I have a computer virus? And how did those emails get sent while my computer is offline? I’ve scanned my computer for virus’ everyday for the past three days and it comes up clean each time. How can I make this nightmare end? I’ve tried contacting netzero, my internet/email provider, but there’s no help for this sort of thing. How can I shut down my email if that’s what’s necessary? I appreciate any help any of you can provide. This sucks. I get 20+ emails a day now from email addresses saying mail I never sent is undeliverable. To all of you virus creators out there…eat a fat one you slaggy, lazy, sons of b#*@~!!! Karma’s going to come back and make you into mealy worms in the next life. :mad:
Nope.
They didn’t because that’s not possible.
What most likely happened is that someone who has your email address in their contact list has a virus. The virus emails copies of itself from their computer, and spoofs the return address using various email addresses from their contact list (including yours). So when the virus tries to mail itself to a nonexistent address, the mail server it was sent to looks at the spoofed return address, sees your email address, and bounces the email back to you instead of the person it actually came from.
You could try to get everyone who is likely to have you in their contact list to scan their computers for viruses. If that doesn’t solve the problem, there’s really nothing that you can do.
… short of getting a new email address from your ISP, and completely blocking your current one.
Probably SoBig – it uses a random third-party e-mail as it’s “From:” field, so e-mail servers that are set to automatically inform people they’ve sent a virus e-mail will send it to you, even though you’re uninfected.
When the person with a virus realizes it, the messages will stop.
There seems to be a spammer who was infected in the last day or two. My yahoo account is suddenly maxing out it’s 6MB “Bulk” folder every 8 hours. Nothing but Sobig in there. All it seems I can do is send folks a message saying something like this:
"It seems someone I may know has just gotten around
to being infected by the W32.Sobig.F@mm
pain-in-the-ass. One of the things it does is spoof
email addresses, making it apear the the message is
actually sent by a different person.
I’ve recieved a few bounce notices for
virus-infected messages that were never sent from my
IP. So if you got one, and are mad at me, please
don’t be.
If you have me in your address book, you might want to
check yer system, but I’m fairly sure it was some
spammer that picked up the bug."
I may have to abandon the account.
Thanks guys and gals,
Sorry I havent been online recently to thank you for the help. I’ve emailed everyone in my emai list and asked them to scan their computers. You guys have taken a serious load off my shoulders. I’ll return the favor anytime. 
Most of it should clear up by now as I believe one worm was dated to Sept 10th. It’s cleared up for me.
Ialways try to filter them out or have my mail program skip email larger than 50k. But Of course that way I don’t get attachments.