speedking

I had a (bounce) message from my ISP telling me that an e-mail I had sent could not be delivered because it was addressed to too many recipients. The quoted initial recipient was not an e-mail address that i know, i.e. not from my address book.

I am concerned that my e-mail might have been hijacked and used to distribute bulk e-mails.

I run XP. I do not use Outlook as my mail client. I have a reputable paid for AV programme running and constantly updated. I run spybot and adaware frequently.

Is there anything I can do to find out whether there is a sneaky trojan hiding in my computer? Is it possibly an error by the ISP and nothing to worry about? I have only had this once, about a month ago.

Any help gratefully received.

RichB

Your address has probably been spoofed, I could send emails from anyone I like it's not difficult....
I wouldn't be too worried myself but a trojan/adware/spyware check wouldn't go a miss. Can't help you there though as I'm a Mac user myself.

speedking

Spoofed meaning that someone else has sent an e-mail pretending to be me, so it wouldn't actually require something to be resident on my pc?

Must be within my ISP though for the bounce to be generated as the e-mail was rejected?

BlkKnight

not necessarily.

If I set the from & reply to to be somone else I can send it from anywhere and you'd still get the bounce

RichB

not necessarily blk, it depends on your outgoing SMTP server...
Some ISPs will allow this if you do collect before send, it then knows you are an authorised user of the mail server. Some wont allow it if your trying to send from a domain it doesn't know about...

Luminous

iTrader: (3)

Contact your ISP and ask. Show them the mail in question.

I suffered this issue recently from a FastMail account. Someone had worked out my address and decided to send x million spam mails in my name. There is nothing you can do to stop the person sending the mails if they are originating outside of your ISPs network.

What you can do is ask them to check where the source of the mail has come from. The information that is contained in the email headers will allow them to determine if it has come from your connection. They may not be interested of course and just assume that your address has been spoofed.

A responsible ISP would check. They would want to make sure there had been no breach of their security. The last thing they would want is to become black listed. Zen are really hot on this. If you send any spam, or mail that looks to be spam they drop on your like a ton of bricks demanding an explanation. They don't want other service providers to start and ban traffic that comes from their servers for obvious reasons!

Sheepsplitter

This happens to me a lot.
My company website has a contact us address, and it's forever being used.
It's highly unlikely to be a virus on your PC, but check anyway.
Personally I'd use TrendMicro, and Housecall can be run without install on the PC. It tends to find things others miss (in my experience).

You can't stop it, once they have your email address, unless you change your address.
Also chances are they 'guessed' your address.
It's common practice for SPAMers to spoof random addresses as the 'from' bit of the envelope.

pimmo2000

iTrader: (6)

Whats the ISP ?

speedking

Demon.