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Can any of you email tech boffins help me out.
I am receiving a lot of returned email messages that are coming from email addresses that I have never sent an email to.
Anyone know what is causing this and how do I stop it?

If they have attachments they are virus mails

yes i am increasingly getting more of these at work - my advice: you need a good Virus checker that sifts thru your emails before you read them. Don't click/open any message attachment that has an extension of 'PIF', BAT, SCR, EXE etc

Prawn wrote:If they have attachments they are virus mails

... and if they don't, they're probably spam mails sent from someone else's machine, but using your address as the 'from' address.

None of the emails are Spam. They all have a file attached that ends with .dat with a size of about 240 bytes. I believe none of the attachements are a virus. All the "550 MAILBOX NOT FOUND" email addresses are @aol.com.

Anymore thoughts?

They are return notifications from invalid email addresses. A number of recent viruses automatically send themselves out to all addresses in the infected PC's address book and will select one of the addresses at rendom as the senders address. Therefore, if any of the addresses are no longer valid, the recipient's mail server will send a response to the sender (or the apparent sender i.e. you).
Just delete them. They don't, in themselves contain a virus, but they are the result of one.
However, I would recommend that any computer that is in any way connected to the Internet, should have anti-virus software installed.
We recommend Computer Associates eTrust Anti-Virus (www.ca.com). A 60 day trial version can be downloaded from their web site. It has proven to be far superior to the likes of Norton, Dr Soloman etc....and I wouldn't even touch McAfee.
You should also install some kind of firewall, preferably a separate hardware unit, although the built-in firewall in Windows XP will generally suffice for most home users.

If anyone wants any advice/help in this or any related area, by all means PM me. I run a Microsoft Cetified Partner company and I have a bunch of very clever techies who can answer most questions thrown at them.

Cheers
Paul

I am running Sophos Anti virus which is very good and seems to have caught everything so far, also I use an ADSL modem that has a built in hardware firewall.

FatBoy wrote:We recommend Computer Associates eTrust Anti-Virus (www.ca.com). A 60 day trial version can be downloaded from their web site. It has proven to be far superior to the likes of Norton, Dr Soloman etc....and I wouldn't even touch McAfee.

Hi I agree the eTrust stuff is good. Even better they have a version with one years free updates available from http://www.my-etrust.com/microsoft

Cheers,

David

DJG wrote:

FatBoy wrote:We recommend Computer Associates eTrust Anti-Virus (www.ca.com). A 60 day trial version can be downloaded from their web site. It has proven to be far superior to the likes of Norton, Dr Soloman etc....and I wouldn't even touch McAfee.

Hi I agree the eTrust stuff is good. Even better they have a version with one years free updates available from http://www.my-etrust.com/microsoft

Cheers,

David

- If you asked me what I do for a living.... The above description is a match. I'm often refered to the best eTrust Antivirus person at CA!!

eTrust Antivirus has two scanning engines - I moved to CA from Vet Antivirus when we were aquired in 1999.