[thelist] RE: troubling Mail delivery failed message

[Ken Schaefer]

Hi there,

I think you'll find that the original message had a "spoofed" From: address
(which happened to be yours). An antivirus filter at the recipient's end
bounced the message back to the purported serve (you).

Most viruses that spread themselves via SMTP/email work like this, and have
done so for years. Person A gets infected. The virus scans their harddisk
looking for email addresses. It constructs a message from Person B to Person
C and sends it off. Person C thinks the message came from Person B.

It makes tracking down the actual infected party (Person A) relatively
difficult.

But this is a bit off-topic, so I won't go into any more detail. Suffice to
say, you probably have nothing to worry about.

Cheers,
Ken

: -----Original Message-----
: From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org [mailto:thelist-
: bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Steven Streight
: Sent: Wednesday, 16 March 2005 8:26 AM
: To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
: Subject: [thelist] RE: troubling Mail delivery failed message
: 
: I use Firefox browser.
: 
: In my Gmail spam file, I saw a message with subject:
: "Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender"
: 
: The From party does not exist. I googled the sender of
: this delivery failure message, no info, except a web
: site, which of course I did not go to.
: 
: I did a search of my mail for the alleged address I
: sent a message to. No such address.
: 
: Here's the intro of message: "This message has been
: rejected because it has a potentially executable
: attachment..." then it mentions a pif attachment,
: whatever that is.
: 
: I only sent RTF rich text format documents as
: attachments, never any other kind.
: 
: It is a multi-part message in MIME format. Not as an
: attachment, but in the body of the message, there are
: 6 pages of nonsense like "ERT8744duiDDF9098oi8" etc.
: 
: What is this? I deleted it, but regret opening it.
: 
: Have I finally been tricked by the bad guys?
: 
: Steven Streight
: Web Usability Analyst & Content Writer
: Blogologist
: Digital Media Artist
: Virtual Instrument Music Composer