I just checked one of my Yahoo accounts and there were three emails “returned” to my inbox. The return mail was from “mailer daemon” and said that some of the addresses that I sent to were undeliverable. From the return mail I can see that the addresses got spam that looked like it came from me. It was the worst kind of spam too (pill to increase penis length kind of stuff.) How did this happen and how can I stop it? If this is reported to Yahoo, will they delete my account? It’s the email that I use for the SDMB that I have never used for anything else ever.
Spammers often take a recipient’s e-mail account and put it as the sender. Makes it harder to track.
Yahoo is probably wise to the trick. They will only delete the account if the headers indicate it was mailed from your account. Since the actual message was mailed from somewhere else, your account should be safe.
You can’t really stop it, but in my experience, it happens sporadically – one or two messages, but then no more. The software that does this will pick another e-mail address next time.
This happened to me. They weren’t spamming from my inbox, they were using my email as the Reply To.
I found their contact details by clicking on their spammy fucking herbs-over-internet crappy suckbitch site. I then set that alias@mydomain to forward back to them, rather than me.
I have been getting angry with spammers recently.
Yesterday I replied a with a stream of expletives to the latest African Money Scam spammail, plus “I hope you fucking burn in hell” - it made me feel a lot better. Thinking they may actually have read it makes me feel even more better…
NB: I never normally reply to spammers, I know you’re not supposed to.
You did mention that the email address is only used for SDMB, so maybe this is off - but that sounds a lot like the klez worm that’s going around. I get a few "returned mail’ emails every day that explain that an email I sent to a particular email was undeliverable. Except, like you, I’ve never heard of the email address and certainly never sent the email.
Now, that doesn’t mean that the spoofer did so by sending you something; they could have sent something to someone else who had your email and then spoofed that person’s entire address book.
But again, as you said, you only use that email for here, so I dunno.
I think that what has been suggested here is correct. They are only using my email addy as the “Reply To:” There were a couple of more returned messages this morning. One of them was for a mortgage company of some kind and the links for more information were preserved in the email that came back. The IP address of these assholes are in the links. (202.108.42.31). Now that I have an IP address, can anything be done to find out who they are and report them to their ISP?
It’s caused by the Klez virus. All it means is that someone who has your email address in their Outlook address book has been infected by Klez. Klez has then massed emailed out using your address as the ‘reply to’ address. Some of the addresses it sends to are old invalid ones, so they bounce back to you rather than the originally infected person who inadvertantly sent them in the first place.
Klez also sends out emails that are deliberately made to look like they are bounces to email you’ve sent previously, so you open the attachment wondering why you don’t remember sending it.
I’ve had plenty of both of the above. Along virus warnings from automated virus checkers and well-meaning people telling me the email ‘I’ sent is infected.
Cool link, RealityChuck, it turns out that these bastards are in Beijing.
It does sound like a Kelz thing. I’ve probably only sent emails to about five dopers. I’m suprised that any of them would put me in their address book since I had no more than a two or three email correspondence with any of them. So it goes…
If I understand correctly my friend could have the virus. I could not. But since I am in his address book, many people could be getting spam that appears to have been sent by me. If any of this spam is undeliverable, then I will get the mailer-deamon error emails about it. The only thing I can do is to tell my friend to delete the virus from his machine.
Is this correct? It appears to be what can happen. Specifically, my SO has been getting emails back that she never sent. She has anti-virus software that is updated. She does’nt have the virus. But, we have to just sit back and take it because someone else has the virus and her in their address book!!
This is the nastiest little bug I have ever heard of.