All of a sudden, strange spamlike messages began appearing in a box labeled “Messenger Service.” I did a SDMB search on “Windows Messenger Service” and quickly found info on how to stop this (seems to work, at least so far). But some questions remain:
Why did messages suddenly begin appearing? (I was “MS free” for years up until now.)
How do spammers make use of this?
What are the legitimate uses of this?
When disabling the Messenger Service, I saw a note that said that this is not related to Windows Messenger. So there’s another such thing to worry about?
Windows Messenger is designed for a network environment, to let system adminstrators send out notices (e.g., “The network will be going down in ten minutes for maintenance. Save your work.”).
A few months ago, spammers figured out you could do this from outside the organization, and to machines that weren’t part of a corporate network. They find your IP address and then use the service to send spam. It became more of a problem when Windows XP was deployed, since the service is turned on as a default.
If you’re a home user, you don’t need it. You probably don’t even need it in a corporate environment, since very few companies use it.
Windows Messenger is Microsoft’s answer to AOL Instant Messenger. You need to set it up and log in, so you’re not likely to get any spam from that ordinarily.