Undeliverable Mail I did not send

[BillyBB]

In the last few hours I have received many returned emails I did not send. They are all Russian and a few even list my correct email as the sender. This is my POP3 acount but nothing appears in the sent items folder.

I have updated definitions and performed three different system scans which have all been negative for Adware, Spyware and Virus or Trojans. Has some Russian Spammer spoofed my address? Help.

[woofgang]

what happens is that something hits your system and steals your addresss book, then uses it on another computer to send emails. This happened at work last year and because I email myself at home, it got hold of my home email and I started to get loads of automatic emails saying that an email that I had sent had a virus in it. Keep you firewall and virus scanning up and delete the emails as they arrive, immediately clearing your deleted email box. This was the advice that I got from the boffins at work and it has sorted itself, although it is worrying. Also make sure that your virus definitions are up to date so that your virus software isn't missing anything.

[LeMarchand]

woofgang's advice is top notch, though it's just as likely that someone has "spoofed" your email account. This recently happened to me with a non-existant account (sales@) for a domain that I have all mail addressed to forwarded to me, no matter what precedes the @.

None of the recipients that I noticed were people in my address book. (I don't have anyone from France in there!) It's annoying that some Viagra merchant has sent out this rubbish pretending to be from my domain, but at least it wasn't to people I know!

If anyone knows someone I could usefully report the spam merchant to...

[BillyBB]

Thank you both.

The system is always on with a full security package which auto updates. Plus I frequently run two other system scans which catch any spyware that has slipped through.

Most of the emails are Cyrillic and no reports from any of my contacts that they are receiving junk from me. Checking the properties it appears that this mail has originated in and bounced around the Baltic and Russia before suddenly coming 'Back' to me.

Fortunately after getting hundreds yesterday it has stopped for now.

[Bazza2764]

i never open "returned undeliverable mails" one of our IT techies at work warned me about it, as has been said it steals your address book and sends the same mail to everyone on it. the advice given is sound.