strange emails

Anthillmob

i only use my hotmail account for personal stuff and my yahoo and blueyonder fror signing up to anything.

recently in hotmail ive started getting emails with attachments saying either 'mail delivery status unsent' or replies from people ive never heard of containing attachments.

obviously im not daft enough to even open such mails but where the hell have they got me from and does this sound like a worm? ive not sent any emails to HMV.chsash (or whatever it was) etc yet im getting message notification failures with attachments from them.

so be warned peeps incaseyou see something in your box (oooerrrr :rotfl: ) DONT OPEN IT

but how do you rid yourself of worms of the internet variety?

Poppycat

I never open attachments unless I no 100% the person, rarely get them anyhow some just contain html code that are phising etc

Alfie_E

Anthillmob wrote:

obviously im not daft enough to even open such mails but where the hell have they got me from and does this sound like a worm?

It sounds like a worm/virus.

Your email address will have been got from the address book of someone you’ve given your email address to, presumably a personal friend. The malicious code will have got run on their computer. It’ll have started sending emails out to all the people in your friend’s address book, using another email addresses in the address book as the from address. If it uses your email address as the from address and sends to an email address where the receiving computer refuses to accept it, the receiving computer will send the failure notification to you, as it was your email address that it appeared to come from. Your email address, along with the others in the address book, may have been sent back to a central computer to be collected by those that produced the malicious software.

No matter how careful you are with your email address and your own computer, if you actually use an address, it will eventually end up receiving spam or viruses/worms. This is because you can guarantee someone else who you have email correspondence with will slip up. Never using it still isn’t a guarantee. Software could discover it by making up lots of addresses at random. Someone at the company you trusted with your email could sell it to criminals. Not likely with Hotmail, but I believe that’s happened to me with a much smaller company.

pyrorus

Hotmail and yahoo are both suseptable to pot luck spammers too.

Theres so many hotmails and yahoo emails that just randomly typing words infront of the @wherever.com with hit lucky.

they also use the usernames on things like this and try them. Its an old trick that still works. If you reply to them you just confirm that they are live emails and you will be bombarded.

If its not from someone you know or expecting then just mark it as spam, hotmail and yahoo do actually have good spam filters and by doing this only improves them

rus