Cecil Bankston wrote:
Thanks for all the good advice. In this case there was no problem
recognizing the messages as spam, with subject of "Re:" and only a
shortened link in the body. My main concern was determining whether the
friend's computer had malware vs. the from address being spoofed. The
friend is in TN, and Comcast is the provider. The
whatismyemailaddress.com/trace-email analysis shows this:
Source:
The source host name is "resmail-po-385v.sys.comcast.net" and the source
IP address is 162.150.177.140.
Geo-Location Information
Country United States
State/Region TX
Comcast is big and diverse, and it's hard to tell if they may be using
an outbound mail server that's in another geographic location.
I tried several geolocation tools, and it's unclear where that is
actually located. I'm seeing Colorado, Kansas, Connecticut, West
Virginia and "potomac" reference that would imply Washington DC.
Should the different state source location indicate that the source is
not my friend's computer?
Should the friend contact Comcast support about this?
I'd say it's not your friend's computer, and it might be a dynamic IP
address that shouldn't have a mail server attached to it.
As for contacting Comcast, sure, he can pass along the information, but
it's pretty doubtful that they'll do anything. I don't know what's
currently happening right now, but 5 or 6 years ago, they had a
reputation of being pretty apathetic about this kind of problem. If I
remember correctly, it was official policy that they weren't going to do
anything about customers infected with malware.
I already recommended that the friend do malware scans of the computer,
using multiple applications.
Definitely. For this kind of thing, I generally recommend use of
MalwareBytes, SuperAntiSpyware, and the 30-day demo of Hitman Pro -- and
doing multiple runs of each.
Beyond that, spam is spam -- once somebody else has your address,
there's nothing that you (or anybody else) can do to stop them from
sending mail to you.
This is why you have a right to complain, if you know somebody that's in
the habit of sending out distributions with large To: or Cc: lists. The
other person doesn't have the right to disclose your email address to
others (especially unknown) without your permission, and most of the
time, recipients should not know who each other is, nor interact with
each other through "reply all". And if any of the recipients (and
multiple generation, if forwarded) gets a malware infection that
harvests address books, or addresses from mail stores, then everybody is
exposed.
Maybe one of the effects of services such as Facebook and Twitter is
that the people who do "meatloaf" distributions (not quite spam, but
definitely not ham) may have moved to those kinds of services, or maybe
we're to the point where email no longer such a novelty that people that
don't have anything else to do who are tempted to mass-forward every
funny story and outrage that they see. It's been a long time since I've
had to take the time to debunk a mass-mailed urban legend.
Smith
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