URGENT FOR ALL POSTERS..........snaked

You are not alone. We are all getting mailboxes full of bounced email that we didn't send. It's the sobig virus that's doing it, and there's nothing we can do about it. It does not mean that you are infected. Look in your "sent" email box and you will see that you did not send the original message. The virus forges the "from" line, and only the headers show where the mail really originated. Only problem with that is that the Mail Daemon doesn't read the headers, just the "from" line.

Hi Pat. Welcome to my "organization" -- I suspect the membership is even larger than I imagined. ;-)

The email situation worsens by the day. We already had all the SPAM, then came the forged mail trying to entice us all to give over passwords, bank information, mother's maiden name, credit card numbers - purportedly to eBay, Paypal, Amazon, Best Buy, and now Yahoo. Then comes "sobig." We should be getting paid for opening mail! I have lots of filters on my mail and now I see that subject lines are turning up with things like "V1agra" to get around my beautifully crafted filters. UNFAIR!!!

demon-possessed at times, that's what they are

Larisa, you're not alone. So far I've gotten 234 messages either with the SoBig virus attached or 'returned mail. Thank goodness for Norton - it's deleted every one of the attachments. Make that 236, just got two more - and more are still downloading! Takes forever to actually check my real e-mail for all this crap that's having to download also.

Ye gods, thats not good... I must admit to having a nasty turn tonight when I couldn't connect to the web via my new cable modem and broadband connection, but their Tech. Support helpline merely said to switch it off at the plug, and restart my PC and hey! here I am reading and posting!

But the evening news is full of reports about sobig.f going off like a rocket across the world... worrying...

Suzie B

-- "From the internet connection under the pier" Southend, UK

When I was getting TONS and TONS of bad email, I changed my userid - it's easy (at least it was on earthlink), so now I do it every 2 years or so - whenever things get bad. My friends don't like it (they do not like change), but I hate getting all that spam.

-- Teresa in Colorado snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.net

Last fall I was getting those failed delivery as well. I called my ISP and they told me someone was spamming and using my E addy and if it continued I should change my email addy. It was shortlived. Obviously the spammers moved on other other addys. But by reporting it to my ISP it would also appear on my records that I was having this problem......just in case someone reported ME for abuse!!!

I downloaded a freebie program.....mailwasher. It lets you view all emails on your server before you download to your computer. You can then deal with them. For the spam, I bounce them back to sender and they are deleted. Once you identify an email address as spam it is blacklisted and all future emails from that email addy are automatically marked for bouncing and deleting.

Right from the program and before emails are downnloaded to your computer, you can view the headers, mark email addresses coming from friends. It's user friendly. I haven't noticed a significant drop in the spam yet as I have only been using it for a week or so, but hopefully my email address will start coming across to the spammers as being invalid.

Just thought I would share.

Ann

Hi Ann. I want to urge everyone that uses Mailwasher ( I love it! ) to inspect the blacklist every so often. If you can identify a lot coming from the same or similar places, you can edit one of those and make it into a universal blacklisted address. For example, say you get spammed from snipped-for-privacy@mx2.spamcentral.com and from snipped-for-privacy@mx1.spamcentral.com etc.etc. you can edit one of those and turn it into *@mx*.spamcentral.com or

*@mx*.*.* or even just *@*.spamcentral.* The asterisk (*) is a wildcard which means any character will match it. Mailwasher even offers a test to see if you did it the way you think you did. After you set a wildcard version, you can delete all the other blacklisted addresses that match from the list and Mailwasher won't spend so much time comparing them. More time for you!

Elena

Mailwasher has been my savior in this current worm attack. I don't keep my mail client (Eudora) open and let MailWasher identify them as virus and just delete them.

But, don't set MailWasher to bounce the virus e-mails. If you do, you are just perpetuating the problem.

I have cut down on the amount of spam e-mail I get by at least 50% since I have been running Mailwasher. I bounce all the spam and eventually they take me off their lists.

Mardi

Real e-mail address spelled out to prevent spam. mardi at mardiweb dot com. ____________________

My Quilting page:

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I quit using MailWasher - but, I just reinstalled it. When I quit using it, I was using it for a Hotmail account as well as my POP accounts & that was a pain. I quit using the Hotmail account, but didn't start using MailWasher again until now! I'm going to leave it installed this time!

Sorry...don't know how I did the same one twice... Megan

What Mailwasher needs is a function to automatically delete single addresses that match wildcard addresses in the list. That would make blacklist management so much easier, and the list so much more efficient.

JA

I've got so many addresses on the blacklist, it would be pretty hard to go through and compare them.

Just wait til your clicker finger gets away from you someday and blacklists someone you like. LOL

BTDT, Elena

the virus infected a computer that had your address in it - could be a friend or business associate....it randomly chose your address to use as the ":from" address and started massive spamming....doesn't mean that you ahve the virus

Larisa, who just uploaded the latest Nort> Larisa, I'm getting messages saying delivery failure, just like you are, and

You're right about MailWasher. Wish I would have had the good sense to start using it again before all this hit. Sure would have saved me a lot of time. If everyone else is getting as many e-mails as I have, I'm surprised the internet isn't completely bogged down - my count is up to 340 now. I got 112 total just yesterday.

That is not at all unlikely as most of the Spam has forged headers. I block myself all the time. I have not blocked any of the virus this time as many could be customers who unknowingly opened the attachment and got infected.