Problem
You have recently been recieving a high volume of bounced e-mails from people you've never heard of or e-mailed. Some of these bounced e-mails appear to contain spam messages or viruses.
Explanation
There are three possible explanations for this:
1) Your computer is infected with a virus that is sending out spam.
If you do not have an up-to-date antivirus application, this could be the problem. Some viruses send out spam and viruses to preset e-mail lists. The only way to be sure your PC is not infected is to run a system virus scan on your PC.
We recommend all clients connected to the Internet ensure they have up-to-date antivirus software which has the latest virus definitions. This should be set up to automatically check all incoming files and e-mails from the Internet.
2) A friend or colleage's PC is infected with a virus. This may have picked up your e-mail address from their address book and used it as the From sender address for spam and virus e-mails. (ie Klez)
If you suspect this is the cause of the problem then we suggest you contact everyone on your address book and ask them if they have an up-to-date antivirus application installed. If they don't, there is a risk they are infected and the rouge e-mails may be being sent from their PC. Have them contact AHR Consulting at (973) 839-0095 to have us scan their systems and proved the apprioriate antivirus protection.
3) A spammer is faking the From senders address with your e-mail address, and sending spam and viruses out.
Unfortunately if you are unlucky enough to be targeted by e-mail hijacking, there is little that can be done. Spammers very rarely use their own e-mail address when sending spam and viruses across the internet. Often, they will harvest e-mail addresses from websites and use these to send out spam.
Aside from shutting down your e-mail account (which is obviously very inconvenient), there is little that can be done other than waiting it out. Usually e-mail hijacking only occurs for a week or two before the spammer moves on to using another e-mail address.
How can someone send e-mail with my e-mail address?
Unfortunately this is very easy to do, and impossible to stop. Due to the nature of the Internet, it is simple to specify any sending e-mail address you wish when you send an e-mail.
If you were to check the e-mail headers of the sent message (if available to you in a bounced e-mail), you will find the e-mail was not sent via your SMTP mailservers.
How can I protect my e-mail address from being harvested by spammers?
The simple answer is not to post your e-mail address to a public website. If you have to, try to disguise it by inserting spaces or displaying the e-mail address as an image. Obviously for commercial organizations, this is usually too inconvenient.
Make
sure you have an up-to-date virus checker!
We recommend Norton Anti-Virus.