Spammed!

Contains_Mild_Peril

This evening I have received multiple e-mails to my Hotmail addy. 3 of them said that e-mail I'd sent could not be delivered, which is odd because I haven't sent any from that address recently, The rest of them come from various addresses and many refer to "Brain's predictions" and "Succeed with University Degree", which do not relate to any sites I've been to afaik. Some had attachments, so I junked those e-mails unopened. None of the ones I opened had an "unsubscribe" button or anything, and they thanked me for my non-existent enquiries.
Does anyone know where this crap is coming from, how to stop it and more importantly, is any of it dangerous? Should I virus-scan/ CClean my PC? The only people who've recently gained access to this e-mail address would be those I've bought from and sold to on eBay. I haven't had any bad feedback lately and afaik I haven't upset anyone.
Replies in technodunce-friendly language appreciated!
P.S. I just changed my Hotmail and ebay passwords as a precaution

robt_2

Its a way of life. No need to change passwords. Try a Gmail account instead.

fwor

It's quite likely that someone who has your email address in their email client's address book (maybe a friend or someone you've done business with) has been infected with malware which is generating spam.

The people who write malware like this spoof the sending address by using entries from the address book so that 1. the sender address can't be predicted and filtered by spam filters and 2. any non-deliveries don't come back to the infected person, reducing the chance that they know they are infected.

So it's probably not something you can do anything about, sadly.

ormus

spammers dont even need to know if your email addy even exists.
they can just generate email names and send them out.
the ones that bounce back dont exist, all the others are real addys.
my 3 yahoo accounts block most of them, but not all.

Contains_Mild_Peril

robt wrote: »

Its a way of life. No need to change passwords. Try a Gmail account instead.

I've got one already, thanks. I still have my hotmail address registered in a few places though, including ebay and Paypal.

robt_2

Contains_Mild_Peril wrote: »

I've got one already, thanks. I still have my hotmail address registered in a few places though, including ebay and Paypal.

Change them then

Or if you prefer the hotmail interface, just redirect your gmail account to your hotmail.

Conor_3

Contains_Mild_Peril wrote: »

Does anyone know where this crap is coming from,

Ask matphil in this thread here: http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=729849

It's him and people like him who don't patch their PCs and end up with them infested with malware which spreads this rubbish.

Contains_Mild_Peril

My Hotmail spam filter isn't completely useless - it's caught over 100 of these since they started arriving the other day, but some are still getting through. They're slowing down a bit now, thank goodness.