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Hi all

An irritating variant of spam is arriving in my mailbox. I get lots of the usual sort, but recently I've been getting replies from people I don't know whose
email server has rejected and is returning msgs to me because a virus is attached. In other words, my greennet addr has been used in a spam with virus exercise.

Why use forged names that recipients don't know? The usual trick of mailing from someone's address book has the advantage that recipients may be fooled into opening the item. Perhaps someone has got hold of (or written) one or more viruses, and is just mailing them out to addresses on a list. Possibly the reason for doing it this way is that the viruses do not have the capability to use the address book to propagate themselves? Perhaps there's an advantage in using forged but real addresses because whatever server is being used then doesn't get a lot of bounced mails, which might cause other problems for the sender. Perhaps just creating mayhem is the pleasure?

I reported this to Michael Moritz of GreenNet Support, who gave me a helpful answer, and pointed me to this forum
http://phorum.greennet.org.uk/read.php?f=4&i=5&t=5#reply_5
for some useful info and the SpamCop service.

I thought it might be worth mentioning here to see if the virus problem is more widespread.

Regards

Bob Hare