HELP - whats wrong with my email?

[GaryWatson]

Delivery Status Notification (Failure)?
From: postmaster@mail.hotmail.com
Sent: 28 September 2009 10:22:41

Apparently I have just sent out a pile of emails.

I have nothing in my sent box.

A few months ago I spammed my dad with "hey friend", I even sent myself a message

that time the was stuff in my sent box.

In the last 10 min I have 7 batches of "delivery status notices", they are not from single emails, they are 7 batches.

Previously I thought someone had hacked my account but I changed the P/word and no-one else has access. It seems to have started again because I logged in.

How can I stop it?

[GaryWatson]

I have also changed residencial address, although same PC

I completely wiped the PC a couple of months ago and put in a new windows disk.

I havent open any emails or sent anything this week at all. All I have done is log into my email account.

I no longer use MSN

Any suggestions how to fix this. This email is tied to my Neteller and a bunch of other accounts

[Casinomeister]

Originally Posted by GaryWatson

...How can I stop it?

You can't. My guess is that some spam machine is spoofing your email. If there is nothing in your inbox, then this is what is happening. If you are using this email for your Neteller account, make sure you're not using the same password - and make sure the password is safe from password crackers.

[GaryWatson]

Bryan, I have "delivery failure notices" in my inbox. These messages have attatchments but I dont think its wise to open them

Delivery Status Notification (Failure)?
From: postmaster@mail.hotmail.com
Sent: 28 September 2009 10:22:41
To:

Attachments: 2 attachments | Download all attachments (3.6 KB)
ATT00001 (0.7 KB), You were ...mht (2.9 KB)

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.

Delivery to the following recipients failed.

xxx@hotmail.com
xxx@hotmail.com
xxx@hotmail.com
xxx@hotmail.com

[Casinomeister]

Originally Posted by GaryWatson

Bryan, I have "delivery failure notices" in my inbox. These messages have attatchments but I dont think its wise to open them

I'm guessing that these are merely bounced messages from the spoof emails. The HTML files are probably the content of the message - many spam filters will do this to spam mails. You can try contacting Hotmail's support - but you might as well build a rocket to the moon.

[GaryWatson]

This is a message returned

Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

Thanks Bryan, much appreciated.

[vinylweatherman]

I had this happen a while back. After a peak of 300+ returned "delivery failures" it stopped as quickly as it started.

Your email address may have been harvested from the first instance, by whatever malware did the spamming from your PC. Getting a new PC will not stop it now, the best cure is getting a new email address.

As well as using a new and better password, don't use an email address that is simply of the form "firstname.lastname@domain.com" since many botnets construct their spoof outbound sender this way to make the spam appear to have come from a real person.

If your email is too random to guess, then it is less likely to be spoofed, or be the recipient of spam. If it DOES get spammed, then it is more likely that the spammer was sold or given your specific email address, rather than their botnet having guessed it by stringing together letters, numbers, or names at random.

[shadow123]

probably is not what is happenning with you, but a few years back, the uk
gaming industry was bombed with a virus that created and sent emails from the users address book and parts of recieved messages from the users message folders.All the messages contained the virus as an attachment.

[GaryWatson]

Thanks for the response everyone. Yeah apparently it has been happening for a while. I'm also receiving a lot of block notifications for the messenger service. One e-mail I know of has been using my full name. It's a really old email account, short and simple like myself. I have deleted my entire contact list, I'l start to switch everything over and hopefully that will be the end of it,

thanks again

[GaryWatson]

UPDATE

Apparently this is a virus that spreads so watch out.

I spoke to a few people today on my contact list. If you open these e-mails, the virus will attach itself to your contact list, so beware