On Sat, Feb 07, 2004 at 05:31:10PM -0600, Steve Sloan II wrote: > From what I understand, it's option two, with three as a side > effect. It infected somebody who has your email address in their > address book, then used that information to send itself in your name > to other systems. One of those other systems had an automated virus > scanner, that griped at you because the virus it got claimed to be > from you.
A couple weeks ago I started getting a lot of spam slipping through my filter ( bogofilter is what I use ). It actually appears to be mail sent by automated mail responders in reply to spam sent to them with my return address. Since my filter was originally trained to consider such bounce messages to be important messages and not spam, these get through my filters (I'm trying to retrain the filters, but as a result I may miss some legitimate bounce message in the future). A lot of the time the automated mail responder does not copy the entire spam message to me, except for the subject, so in that case the spam has no chance of having its intended effect on me (getting me to buy their product or visit their web site or whatever). But often enough the mailers DO copy the entire spam, so in effect the original spammers trick these automated mail responders into to spamming me for them, and it is quite effective since the original spammer would not have gotten through my filter but the "legitimate" sender does get though the filters. I'm still wondering whether that was the spammer's intended goal, or whether the spammers just wanted a valid email address to forge their From: and Reply-To:, and I was their unlucky choice. Anyway, if I have any point in this rambling, it is that anyone setting up automated mail responders should be VERY careful. You may inadvertently be spamming innocent victims! -- Erik Reuter http://www.erikreuter.net/ _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
