Why am I getting "mailer-daemon" emails all of the time?

Factual Questions
1

It’s as if a ton of emails that I have sent out are being returned to me, but the thing is, I haven’t sent anything to any of the addresses that the emails have listed.

How can I get this to stop ASAP? I get them every few minutes, and it’s really becoming quite bothersome.

2

Sounds like bouncebacks.

3

Thanks, but what does this mean?

4

Brent,
It sounds like someone you know is infected with the Sobig.F virus that started making the rounds last week. And it’s a rather nasty one at that.

http://antivirus.about.com/library/weekly/aa081903b.htm

Paraphrasing from the link, when the virus infects a machine, it searches that person’s address book for addresses. It then starts sending out copies of itself, but it forges the ‘from’ part of the email to appear that it’s from you. IOW, if my machine is infected, and you and World Eater are in my address book, the virus will send copies of itself to you from my machine but pretend to be from World Eater.

The returned emails you’re referring to are a side effect of this. Competent mailserver admins will, of course, have their servers set up to detect this virus before the message reaches the destination address. They generally also send out a “Warning, you message contained a virus” type message to both the sender and receiver in order to alert both parties to the invection. However, they neglect to realize that these emails are wasted time, bandwidth, and space because Sobig.F forges the from address. And the beauty of it, from the virus’s perspective, is that the infected machine never knows that they’re infected, since none of the returned emails are returned to the infected machine.

Unfortunately, there’s not much you can do to stop it. Sometimes the returned messages will include the intended recipient’s address, if you’re lucky you can make an educated guess about who’s machine is infected by examining the addresses the virus attempts to send itself to. I figured out that my football coach’s machine was infected this way; several of the returned emails were intended for my teammates and people that work at the same company as my coach.

Hope this helps.

5

Some of them also return the body - 100+k. That can overflow a crappy Hotmail account pretty quickly.

6

Just filter them out if you don’t want to get them.