Virus Warning

Fred Holder wrote: snip

I suspect that it's someone who has both our addresses and doesn't have their vrus files updated.

Dave in Fairfax

It used to be that a virus would look in a person's address book to forge the from address. Anymore though, it's more likely that someone's computer has been "owned" by a spammer. That is, the spammers are often the one's writing viruses, which turn a users home computer into a 'spam bot'. Most responsible email admins have configured their servers to disallow sending email if you're not their customer so the spammers create viruses that install themselves on home users machines and use the spam lists as the from address.

Doubt that anybody is targeting you. One thing that might help in the long haul is to make sure you don't have your email address on your web site in a normal format. You can spell it out or there's various ways to disguise it, but the spammers will harvest email addresses from web sites ensuring that you're perpetually on their lists.

Glad you're using antivirus - important to keep it up to date on Windows. (Sure is nice running Linux and not having to worry about all that anymore!)

...Kevin

-- Kevin Miller

Alaska

I agree with Kevin, the same has happened to me, somebody took my e-mail address from somewhere and is now using it to send the same as you are getting plus other rubbish, so far I estimate I have received in excess of 10k return mails and junk, I have now set my reject list to reject everything without a certain name in the header, it works a dream. It only takes a couple of seconds to reject over 200 junk mails (which I am still receiving daily). I refuse to change my e-mail address just to suit these morons.

Happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year

Bob `S`

There are a couple of tricks that will make it very difficult for a spammer to 'mine' your website, but still let people email you hassle0free. One that I use is:

It has the addedbenefit of inserting what you want into the subject field.Also, spammers mine the publically available Domain Name registries. Onyours you use snipped-for-privacy@fholder.com You can change it, but must put in a validemail account (they will check). What I did was create a Yahoo account (thatI never check) and use it on my websites. Dan

See my .sig. The sites aren't much worth looking at, but I'm pushing a year on the server (since the last long-winded power outage). Were it not for the vagaries of the juice coming (or not) out of that hole in the wall, I'd have somewhat over a year uptime.

I've had this email address for a couple years now. I don't post it to usenet but I use it for everything else. I get 1-2 spam emails a day, most days. Yesterday there was none.

Although spam bots will surf web pages looking for harvestable names, newsgroups such as this are a much better target.

Bill