Returned mail

Howard Tate · Post by **Howard Tate** » 28 Apr 2008 10:34 am

The last few days every time I open my web mail there are ten or twelve messages saying "Returned mail" or "Undeliverable mail" or some such, and the sender is always the postmaster or similar. These are spam. Is any one else is getting these, or why am I suddenly getting so many?

Bent Romnes · Post by **Bent Romnes** » 28 Apr 2008 10:45 am

Howard, I have been getting them also. Frequent at first and now just the occasional one. They belong in the garbage of course.

Wiz Feinberg · Post by **Wiz Feinberg** » 28 Apr 2008 10:56 am

What you are seeing in your inboxes are bounced spam messages where the spambot computer has forged your email account as the reply to address.

Spammers harvest email addresses by infecting insecure computers with multi-function Trojans, one part of which searches your address books for email addresses of all of your contacts, as well as your own accounts. It then sends these harvested accounts to the Bot Herders, who then add these accounts to their database. The database is used to assign stolen account names to the To, From or Reply to fields.

There is nothing anybody can do to stop this, other than deleting these messages. This practice has a name: "Joe Job."

Bent Romnes · Post by **Bent Romnes** » 28 Apr 2008 2:56 pm

Kinda scary stuff, Wiz
Bent