that happens to me at work..
the answer could be spam like it was suggested above, but as well as that, if you sent an email to a friend and your friend forwarded your email by you (not the normal forward, but the other one, via their address, so your name (the original sender) would be displayed as the one sent it). If the address used was wrong, you will also get the failure notification.
your friend might have changed the subject line. does that make sense? i hope so..
Getting a new PC would not work. You would continue to get the emails. I also get it all the time and have checked the emails on the ISP email server before my email downloads. Even get bounced emails when my PC has not even been on for a period of time (hence not even been able to send out the email). I have up to date virus scanners and firewalls and log my internet traffic.
Spammers just edited the headers so that it appeared like the email was coming from you. So when the email bounced, it just came back to your email address. Unfortunately there is nothing you can do about it apart from change your email address (hopefully to one spammers also do not have). Alternatively, get good spam killer software that filters out the emails by rules. I have recently got the latest McAfee one which does the job very well. I expect there are plenty of free, cheaper or trial ones on the market.
Here are some tips to avoid spammers getting hold of your email address:
1. If you ever need to add an email address to a web form somewhere, make sure you use an email address which you do not mind being spammed. Set up a web based one like in yahoo or hotmail.
2. Tell all your friends to use Blind Carbon Copies when forwarding bulk emails so your email address does not appear with loads of other people's email address. If a spammer gets hold of this bulk email elsewhere, there is a whole list of emails they can just pick and choose from.
3. Equally, if you are so inclined to send a bulk email to lots of people. Send Blind Carbon Copies out. Nothing pisses me off more than receiving chain emails from my friends where my email address is visible for all to see in the "To:" field.
4. Choose an email address that is obscure. For example, fred@hotmail.com is a very likely email address that a spammer would choose for the hell of it. Would be better to combine your name with a combination of letters and numbers that a spammer cannot "guess". For example, fred58693@hotmail.com. It maybe more difficult for your friends to remember, but if it is stored in their address book then it does not matter.
A Blind Carbon Copy is basically a method of sending emails to people but the receipient cannot see the email address in the "To:" field. In Outlook you can get this box by selecting View->All Headers.
Other mail client software will have different ways of doing this so you would have to look in the help or search on google.
Originally posted by darvlay<geek>
What does it mean when I receive a "Mail Delivery Failed" e-mail stating that an e-mail I sent did not go through but the e-mail that was rejected was not at all sent by me nor do I recognize the address I sent it to?
The subject apparently said "Re: Thanks!" but WTF I didn't send any e-mail like that! Is there something effed here?!
emails can have a 'reply-to' field set up, so that any replies can be sent to a different address than the originating one. so i can send out an email using address "question@mydomain", and set the mail up so that replies come to "answers@mydomain". check the header of the offending email (in outlook/outlook express, do this by selecting Properties of the email) to see if there is a reply-to field present.
in your case, and this is of course imho, spammers have randomly inserted your address into the reply-to field. happens to me too occasionally and that's always been the cause in my case.
</geek>
Check out this notice
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.netsky.y@mm.html
We used to get many of these when this virus first came out.. it doesn't mean though that you have the virus either. There might not be an attachment because your work firewall could be removing it
It could mean that someone has the virus, that has your email located somewhere on their pc.. ie address book, text file. anything
Originally posted by MIODudeI thought about this and it does not seem to be the case based on the nature of the emails that darvlay is getting (judging on what he has described here). They are bounced messages as if he sent them (but didn't). A worm like Netsky would have a specific header and specific contents. It also sends to email addresses that it finds in the address book or elsewhere on the PC. Darvlay mentioned that they are from addresses that he does not know at all.
Check out this notice
http://securityresponse.symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/w32.netsky.y@mm.html
We used to get many of these when this virus first came out.. it doesn't mean though that you have the virus either. There might not be ...[text shortened]... cated somewhere on their pc.. ie address book, text file. anything
Any decent virus scanners would have also blocked this. If it is some new worm which has email addresses hard coded then there could only be a limited number of email addresses that could be practically be hard coded in.
Edit: Spelt Darvlay wrong. 😲
Actually the subjects are Delivery failures..
_________________________________________________________
W32.Netsky.Y@mm is a variant of W32.Netsky.X@mm that scans for the email addresses on all non-CD-ROM drives on an infected computer. Then, the worm uses its own SMTP engine to send itself to the email addresses that it finds.
The format of the email is:
Subject: Delivery failure notice (ID-<random number>😉
Attachment: www.<random domain name>.<random username>.session-<random number>.com
Don't worry darvlay,it's spam.
It's about a year that I'm getting emails in reply to mails I've never sent,but no pc problems yet:however be sure to never open mails with attachments and such crap,always trash mails like that.
My mail address has been put on a spam list,now I just try to use that address as few as possible.
I got similar once, and it was explained to me that someone I know had the virus, which harvested email addresses from their address book and sent mails 'from' those to mailling lists. Those that didn't get through were coming into my inbox as delivery failures as I had apparently sent them.
The problem was therefore not at my end, but with someone who had once previously emailed me.
Originally posted by darvlayYou've been "spoofed".
No it doesn't. Is there anyone here who knows what they're talking about that can help me? How is my computer sending e-mails that I don't know about? This is my work computer and we all use the same e-mail client and server.
You need to sort it.
And remember, for every e-mail you see thrown back at you, perhaps a hundred or so will succeed in reaching their destinations. Given time, you could be reported for abuse.
