email virusy thing...?! please help!

flamingo

Hi folks, sorry if this is in the wrong place, but i don't know where else to post it! - if you know, please put me straight!

Basically, for the past month or so, I've been getting approximately 70-100 emails a day to my gmail account, most of them from Mail Delivery System or Postmaster or Mailer-Daemon, in which case the subject line tends to be along the lines of "delivery failed:returing message" or "unable to deliver:virus". Others come from random people/orgnaisations, with subject lines along the lines of "thanks for your email". Now, I don't understand these things at all and haven't opened any of the emails. but from what I gather looking at the subject lines is that there seems to be a gmail address almost the same as mine (but slightly different) sending off infected emails which are being bounced back to me.

Clearly these aren't emails that I deliberately sent, being returned to me. But I don't know what to do either to stop my computer sending off these infected emails (if that's what's happening) or to stop the emails being sent to me.

Can anyone please offer any advice?! I hate now checking my emails because it's horrible seeing all these unwanted ones!

If it's of any relevance, I have McAfee, AdAware and Spybot all regularly running.

Thanks in advance!
xx

Shane O' Malley

Don't worry. Your computer is not sending those e-mails and certainly not from a gmail account.

Your e-mail address is being faked IE Someone is sending e-mails pretending to be you. (Easy to do)

Nothing you can do about it and it will fade over time.

Thanks

Shane

Ruu_Old

Welcome to the world of spam. Try to keep your email as private as you can when your on the web. Not much you can do otherwise.

flamingo

thanks guys, hopefully you're right and it'll just fade with time so!

the thing that's bugging me the most is that this was my 'proper' email account, that I never give out to randomers or use to sign up to anything...naively thought that'd help keep it clean - clearly not! :rolleyes:

thanks again!
x

kaizersoze

flamingo wrote:

thanks guys, hopefully you're right and it'll just fade with time so!

the thing that's bugging me the most is that this was my 'proper' email account, that I never give out to randomers or use to sign up to anything...naively thought that'd help keep it clean - clearly not! :rolleyes:

thanks again!
x

Chances are they didn't get it from anywhere in particular. It's most likely it was randomly generated by software. I get ones all the time with my address in the cc list along with 15 or 20 different permutations of it.
There is of course the chance that one of your friends has a virus on their machine that's sending all this crap to you.

Capt'n Midnight

Ruu wrote:

Welcome to the world of spam. Try to keep your email as private as you can when your on the web. Not much you can do otherwise.

Some people have more than one email address. One they keep private and only give to people they trust, the others would be for signing up for stuff.

Pop a stamp on a letter and put it in a postbox. If the person who gets it complains about it or if An Post can't deliver it they'll check the back of the envelope in case you wrote an address on the back of it. Of course you could write anyones address on the back...