[Moon-net] Reply to Ken

[G1OGY (Dave)]

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Message: 10
Date: Fri, 6 Oct 2006 11:32:04 -0500
From: "WA4EWV" <wa4ewv at wa4ewv.net>
Subject: [Moon-net] Reply to Ken
To: <moon-net at list-serv.davidv.net>
Message-ID: <002901c6e964$f78f6890$6301a8c0 at WA4EWVCPQ>
Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="iso-8859-1"

I sent this directly to Ken, but thought I would post also. 
Here is his Email to moon net:
Hi,
For the past week or so I have been receiving numerous "Returned to Sender- unable to deliver" type-mails, none of which originated
from me or are in any way related to my actvities.  In the past 24 hours I have received 27 such mails while my son, who like me
uses Wanadoo server,  is similarly affected and received 40 in one download.  I would be interested to know if anyone using the
Moon-net has experienced similar problems, not suggesting of course that this is in any way associated with the net. Meanwhile I am
deleting them on sight on the assumption that they could be a form of virus..   .  
73 Ken G8VR

Here is my reply:
Ken:
More than likely, your computer has become a "Zombie" computer. Look that up 
on Google and it will tell you all about it.
Hope this helps.
Al
wa4ewv at wa4ewv.net


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All

While Al's explaination is a possibility, it is more likely that Ken and his son's addresses have been harvested for use as the
From: address for a spam campaign.  

So, Ken, if you have an effective anti virus program running on your machine then please do not panic.  By all means run the usual
scans.

If you are still concerned, please contact me off list: (my mail address is <my callsign> @ <my callsign>.com

Use of your adress in this way will account for all the "bounce" messages - spammers' lists are probably never cleaned of expired
addresses and (from my professional life) I find that some of the harvester programs used are laughable in their ability to
correctly parse an email address.

I speak from experience here.  My main address was used in an extensive stock(s-&-shares)-spam (Pump & Dump)campaign in the summer.


The most galling thing about this is that there is ~nothing~ you can do about it!  The only option you have, unless you run your own
mailserver (as I do), is to delete the bounce messages or - if possible - train the anti-spam filters provided by your ISP to deal
with them for you.

-- 
Dave Gilligan, G1OGY
_______________________________________
United Kingdom.  JO01GR82
WWW: <www.g1ogy.com> <www.m1cro.org.uk>
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