Please help! spam.

Rach · Post by **Rach** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 3:45 pm

Sorry for the length of this but I am a bit of a numpty when it comes to this sort of thing.
[ have done a full virus scan [Norton] and no virus was discovered.]
I am a fairly canny with my email address and have no idea how I have managed to get so many spam emails. Since my junk mail was deleted I am now getting many and various replies saying that the mail could not be delivered. So far I have only opened two and have certainly not opened any attachments, the remainder are in my junk mailbox. Orange said to look up 'whois' to find out the I.P. I have only done this for one and this was the message back. It means absolutely nothing to me. [Part of the full header seemed to come from Argentina but had no id no.] IP address:
10.10.10.171
Reverse DNS: [No reverse DNS entry per prisoner.iana.org.]
Reverse DNS authenticity: [Unknown]
ASN: 16559
ASN Name: REALCONNECT-01
IP range connectivity: 1
Registrar (per ASN): ARIN
Country (per IP registrar): *I [[Private IP]]
Country Currency: Unknown
Country IP Range: 10.0.0.0 to 10.255.255.255
Country fraud profile: Normal
City (per outside source): Unknown
Country (per outside source): -- []
Private (internal) IP? Yes
IP address registrar: whois.arin.net
Known Proxy? No
Link for WHOIS: 10.10.10.171

I am also wondering if I am getting spoofed emails as they are to my address after the @ but just jumbled letters before. Is there anything I can do about this?

Post by **emanday** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 4:01 pm

Hi Rach,

What do you mean by

Since my junk mail was deleted

You didn't delete the Junk Mail folder in your mail program did you?

Post by **AndrewP** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 4:05 pm

You have my sympathy. I receive a couple of dozen of these (as well as the ones offering various pills & potions, loans, body enhancements etc.) every day between the three e-mail addresses that I use. It seems to be common practice by these spammers to use the domain part of your e-mail address and a scattering of letters before the @. They use these addresses for sending out their spam, a significant proportion of which is to addresses that no longer exist, or where firewall programs reject the mail. It is the bounce-backs from these that you are receiving. It is possible that some may still contain the attachment potentially with virus, so I strongly advise you never to open an attachment on one of these. I run McAfee Security Suite that picks almost all of these, but I always check through the ones it rejects because there is occasionally one that it shouldn't have trapped, and I have to release it from there to receive ir before disposing of the rest of them.

Unfortunately, I don't know of a way to stop your e-mail address being abused once it has started.

All the best,

AndrewP

Rach · Post by **Rach** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 4:41 pm

Oh, dear! Mary, do you mean I shouldn't have deleted the junk folder?
I live and learn! Too impetuous for my own good.
Thanks for the sympathy, Andrew. I know lots of folks receive spam but up until orange took over from wanadoo I had no problems. Maybe that was just co-incidental.
Thanks to you both,
Rae

Post by **emanday** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 4:56 pm

Well, No!

That's the folder your email server dumps all recognised junk mail into. It means you don't get rows and rows of junk mail in the main inbox.

P.S. check the Junk Mail folder just to make sure no valid mails have been put in there (once you've put it back that is

)

Rach · Post by **Rach** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 5:32 pm

Thanks, Mary,
I have changed my settings so that all spam goes into the junk folder straight away bit will keep checking because sometimes mail I do want goes under spam even though it is in my approved list. It must be certain words or something.
Rae

pinkshoes · Post by **pinkshoes** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 5:52 pm

Wonder if it's just coincidence but in the last 5 or 6 days I've had dozens of "mail undelivered" messages using the domain exactly as Andrew described. Some have attachments, some not. Most of them are caught by the ISP spam catcher, but a lot are getting through - don't know what distinguishes one from another. It's becoming a real pain in the neck to be honest but I've no idea whether it can be stopped. This has literally just started in the last few days, but if I counted them I'm sure I'm into hundreds.

I will speak to my in-house computer geek on the subject, and if I can understand what he's saying, will report back.

Best wishes
Pinkshoes

Post by **AnneM** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 7:21 pm

Hi

I get endless quantities of spam only some of which ends up in my junk mail folder. I get sick of having to delete all that rubbish unread. There is the occasional legit e-mail that gets wrongly branded including one from our own DWW and as to what it can do to mails from a friend whose surname is Cummins??????

Anne

Jockbird · Post by **Jockbird** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 9:11 pm

Evening!

I'm having the same problem & like Pinkshoes mine only happened in the last 5 or 6 days.

I'm used to the bouncebacks with AOL but now I'm getting up to 10 a day from all over the globe.

I'm with Orange, I called them, got some poor girl who I could not understand and was on the phone for 37 minutes to come up with the square root of s*d all! She just referred me to one of their Help & Support bits....like I'd not read that already???

I'm also on McAfee Security Suite but I called my local computer chap & he suggested using a second opinion tool on www.pandasoftware.com/products/activescan
I did this and I also ran it through http://safety.live.com/site/en-US/default.htm You may want to run your pcs through these, both are free, just to make sure nothing is infected. Now I may be being over cautious but I wanted to make sure that I had no virus, even though I'd not opened any of the attachments or the mails themselves and got rid of them via Spamkiller. Luckily all was well.

My PC chap believes it's probably a worm which McAfee & the likes are probably working on a patch for now. He'd also had another call from someone who was experiencing the same problem.

Out of interest, were any of you members on the Lanarkshire FHS site which was hacked a few months back? I was and it's the only breach in security I can think of, apart from some who reported on GR that they thought GR had a security problem.

It is tedious & infuriating, I do wish they'd grow up & do something useful like play with the traffic!

Donna

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Jockbird · Post by **Jockbird** » Fri Jan 05, 2007 9:53 pm

Out of interest, do any of you clever computer people know of a way to stop your e-mail address being abused once it has started???

Donna

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