Returned e-mails that I never sent

What’s going on??

For about 2 weeks now I’ve been getting returned as undeliverable, e-mails that I never sent.

Is this some sort of phishing?

or possibly

Thanks

Most likely, someone’s sending out some kind of spam or virus with your address. This is usually chosen at random from one spammer’s list and sent to all the other.

“Amusing” anecdote: I went on three weeks’ vacation in 2003. During this time I had an out-of-office responder set on my mail client (not the server - there was my mistake). About a week into my holiday, a spammer sent me a mail using my own email address. So my autoresponder sent an out-of-office mail - back to me. My mail client then responded with an out-of-office mail to itself. Repeat 200,000 times. It took me three days and a huge amount of screwing around to delete them all.

The most likely explanation is a virus. No, don’t panic… It’s not a virus on your system. The “from” address on an e-mail works much like the return address on an envelope: It’s an honor system for senders to give the right information. But I could, in principle, and without too much difficulty, send someone a letter with the return address “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC”, and I could likewise, with similar ease, send someone an e-mail with the from address “president@whitehouse.gov”.

Now, of course, most folks are honest, and put their real address in for the “from” address. But viruses that spread via e-mail are, of course, not honest, and want to hide where they’re coming from. So what probably happened here, is that someone with whom you have had correspondence has an e-mail virus. The virus picks through all of the e-mail addresses it can find on the computer (including yours, if you’ve ever sent an e-mail to or received one from that person), and picks one at random for the recipient, and another one at random for the “sender”. So an e-mail is sent out claiming to be from you (but it isn’t).

Now, the recipient of that e-mail may have some server-level virus protection, or the recipient’s address may no longer be valid, or for some other reason, the mail doesn’t get through. In this case, the recipient’s e-mail server will often look at the e-mail, and send an error message (like the ones you’re getting) to the “sender” of the e-mail. Or, at least, to the address that the server thinks is the sender. Which, in this case, is you.

Thanks Chronos that makes sense…I think :slight_smile:

Anyways all I do now is just delete 'em cos I know who I’ve sent mail to and I also know they’ll get it…again I think

I didn’t know you could delete emails that way! :wink:

If it really was 200,000, you got me beat. My email account (one of) at work, is a catch all acount. Well, someone started using the domain with random user names as a return address for spam. In the course of a half hour I received 134,000 emails. After trying to let them download into outlook for a few hours I gave up, shut down my computer and called the people who hold the domain. I left a message and asked him to delete them on his side since I’m sure it would be alot easier. When he got into the office and called me, he said he was already planning to call me anyways. Turned out, the night before (when I received all the emails, they noticed a huge load on their server and traced it back to my account. Luckily they shut my account down so the emails would stop piling up. I haven’t checked, but even a day or two later, when I tried turing the catch all back on they started pouring in again.

Some of the bounced emails even metioned that my domain was now blacklisted, I hope I never have to email anyone at any of those domains.