spam undelivered emails

[Coldicote]

I have many so-called undelivered emails coming to me that I never sent in the first place. Somewhere along the the way there's someone putting just anything in front of the @ which makes it look as though I've sent them to a non existent address and so they come back to me. Does anyone else have this problem and know a way of dealing with it please?

[vehelpfulguy]

Maybe your PC has been hijacked to send out thousands of spam e-mails. See article here

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3528810. stm

Do you run a firewall and anti-virus software ?

If not then get Zone Alarm free firewall and AVG anti-virus which is also free.

May be worth having Adaware and WinPatrol as well which are also both free.

[Hippy]

I'll bet you a turkey sandwich on 26th Dec that if you don't have your computer on for a day when you switch on you'll still get them.

It probable that your address has been harvested, most likely from someone who has it in THEIR address book, a good place to find live emails don't you think, and then the robots get on their way trying to propagate by spamming all and sundry in the hope that some server somewhere will let the spoof email pretending to be from you in.

The silly servers just bounce the mail and incredibly complete with nasty payload to you. They think you sent it but it is most likely from far away. Most sensible server operators turn this feature off. All unrecognised or suspect mail is then merely deleted with no further action.

[rojash]

There are two likely causes: The first, as described by Hippy is that someone else is faking your address, and you are then getting the genuine bounces. The other is that they are viruses which are not genuine bounces at all, but made to appear so, to encourage you to open them. In either case, the fault is not with you!
I get around 600 junk mails a day (I have a number of e-mail accounts) and use the excellent MailWasher to filter the spam. Around 60% are true bounces, 30% are fake bounces, 5% are pure spam, and the rest are real e-mails!

[Coldicote]

I'm very grateful for these replies. It does put the problem into perspective and makes me feel I am not alone! Yes, I have MailWasher; also Norton Internet Security including a firewall and anti-virus; and my ISP dumps hundred of known spams into a 'junk mail' folder, so I do not need to receive them but can have a look if I want to! It will be interesting to see if anything further comes to light. Thanks to all for your interest.