Emails with virus attached!!

[marybank]

I have recently received a number of emails purporting to come from reputable courier services, UPS or DHL, telling me they can not deliver a parcel as there is 'an error in shipping address'. I am told to open the label attached, which no doubt contains a virus, and this will enable me to collect parcel from 'our post office'. The surprising thing about these emails is that they arrived in my mail box as the email addresses used, three different, start with the first two letters of my email and there the similarity ends!! I wonder if anyone would like to comment on this situation and would be interested if any other ABers have received similar emails.

[VHG]

Did you get flagged these were viruses?

Do you have an anti virus running?

If you had an anti virus program like Avast it has an email scanner that will check incoming emails and give a warning that they have a virus attached.

Many of these types of emails are sent out using "random" email address generators, so it will have been sent to thousands of people (probalby with blind copy so you dont actually see who it was sent to).

Your name will have been in there somewhere.

[another-view]

It is spam. Delete it. You are on a spammer's list.

[Mustardmit]

Get them all the time, from phonies pretending to be famous banks, paypal, Facebook friend requests.
The bottom line: if you weren't expecting it or it's from persons unknown -bin it without
even opening it (not even the message).

[marybank]

Thank you for your answers. Yes I do have anti virus and the messages were in my Spam tray and no harm was done as I did not open the attachments. It is the first time I have actually been aware of getting this type of mail and still don't understand why it came through without a proper email address. Thank you all again for taking the time to reply. Marybank.

[squarebear]

Say I was a spammer and had ten thousand email addresses. I wouldn't want to share them with anyone and also if any of my addresses were wrong, I don't want to be notified.

What I would do is to pick some poor sucker from my list and address the email to them. The other 9,999 addresses go in the BCC field, so no-one else can see them. Then I mail it. Any addresses that bounce back will go to the person in the TO field and not to me.

Bingo! 10,000 spam emails sent out and no-one thinks it was me!

You are in the BCC list of the spammer's email.