I’ve been getting lots of messages in my hotmail account which tell me there was a failure in trying to deliver a message to some e-mail account.
The e-mail address that I’m told couldn’t be delivered to is not one I’ve ever sent anything to. The e-mail message generally has a title of “error in mail delivery system” and the messages are 144k in size, although there seems to be little in them. The e-mail address that failed is different everytime. Also, the from e-mail addy on the message changes with each message.
What is going on? Is opening these things exposing me to something?
It’s probably the work of klez, sobig or one of the other email worms out there. Somehow, a copy of the worm got hold of that address, and now is using it to spoof the return path when it sends out copies of itself. I was getting quite a few of these on my old ISP account. My new Earthlink account doesn’t get any…yet.
Oh, and you’re perfectly safe as long as you don’t download and run the attachment. Hotmail scans with McAfee antivirus, and so shouldn’t allow you to anyway.
The bad news is that it is filling my hotmail account! Just about twice a day, too. It goes into my junk mail folder, but that mail still counts against my account. Anything I can do about this?
About the only thing you can do, short of changing your email address, is to notify every person who might have your address in their contacts list and have them run a scan for viruses. You can also try putting keywords from the message subject(s) into the custom filters on Hotmail and set it to delete them upon receipt.
If the filters don’t work, all I can really tell you is to dump your junkmail folder every time you check your mail. You can’t delete stuff in the junkmail folder, but there is a button that allows you to empty the whole folder. I believe it’s got a creative title like “Empty folder,” it will dump all that crap into your trashcan, where it doesn’t count against your limit. I’ve had my account so long that I have to dump the spam every couple days.
“Empty folder” in the Junk Mail folder really deletes it immediately. As in permanently gone. If you want to “save” something in the Junk Mail folder for a very short time, select it and move it to the Trash Can folder (listed under the “Put in folder” menu). Where it can be recovered later if need be and you don’t wait too long.