I get delivery failure notices and discover that my address has been used to forward spam - selling electrical goods last time, this time something to do with e-bay.
I never get the mail myself and only know what it is as it gets sent to my other e-mail address! So I don't know where it comes from.
Of course contacts will be tempted to mark my address as a source of spam.
It seems there is no way to report this to Yahoo. Their policy seems to be "talk amongst yourselves"? So if anyone can help I would be very grateful.
Thank you While running a virus scan is a good thing in itself, it's a solution unrelated to the problem if we're talking about your Yahoo! Mail account, or any other web-based mail service for that matter. However, if you use an email client located on your computer (such as Outlook Express) doing a virus scan is definitely recommended even though viruses are not the most common cause of what's happening to you.
Sorry, the rest of my answer is going to be long, but you should know something about how spammers operate.
One tactic spammers use is to disguise their spam by sending out fake failure notices. They do this for two reasons: 1) it's an attempt to bypass spam filters, and 2) the recipient is extremely likely to open and read such messages either out of curiosity or the fear that their address is being associated with spam. Thus, the failure notice IS the spam. This may be what's happening, but it's hard to tell the difference between a real failure notice a fake.
Another tactic spammers use is known as "spoofing." They hide their identities is by inserting fake addresses in the From: and Return-Path fields of the messages they send out. Nearly every spam email contains such spoofed addresses. (Other fields can be spoofed as well, especially To: and Date:, which is why you'll often see spam that's not addressed to you, or apparently sent from dates far in the future or past. Basically, when it comes to spam, the header usually indicates nothing about the true origin or destination of the message.)
Frequently these "fake" addresses happen to be real addresses of ordinary people like you and me. This is more likely to happen if the username portion of your address is something easily generated by a computer program. For example, it consists primarily of your name and/or words found in a dictionary, or is fairly short. This would be unlikely to happen to someone with a long username that is nothing more than random letters and numbers.
When one of these spam messages bounces, the failure notice will be sent to the address in the From: or Return-Path: field since the true originating address is not contained in the email header.
Unfortunately, there's nothing Yahoo! or any other email provider can do to prevent spammers from spoofing your email address. Spammers are too good at what they do and they know all the loopholes which is why 90% of all email is spam. This whole sad state of affairs exists because the email protocols were created back when the number of people on the internet was measured in mere thousands and no one foresaw the need to authenticate the actual sender of an email.
If your address was spoofed, you can take "comfort" in four things:
1) the original messages did not originate from your account and you are simply an innocent bystander,
2) since the original message is spam, more than likely most recipients never even saw it if they are using a spam filter,
3) the failure notices will stop soon as the spammer moves on to other spoofed addresses (which is why I didn't suggest changing your email address--it's a permanent solution to a temporary problem), and
4) although not everyone is aware of it, it happens to most of us from time to time. Do a virus/trojan scan with prevx2 from prevx.com
If your machine is clear, then get a different mail address.
Your email address is being used by the spammers, and you get the balme. Just get a new email address and shut down the old one. My dads business email had this and it was due to a virus. So do a virus check. You can download AVG and Avast free and they were recommended to me by an IT bloke as the best. |
