A question for you pooter experts

[DavidP]

At least once a day, every day, I receive email through Microsoft Outlook, which is apparently from someone in my address book, or the address book of someone who is in mine (if you see what I mean). The subject line is normally something like “spice girls revealed” or “hello darling” or “this is a great game”.

Sometimes there is no message and sometimes it will be something like “this is a good game, you are its first player, I hope you will enjoy it”. There is never an attachment and it has never had a virus.

Our postulations in the pub last night led us to suspect that it might be an automated system sending them out at random and trying to elicit a response. The sender then has a list of live addresses, which can be sold on to marketing companies.

Does anyone else get this and do you think our guess about its purpose to be correct? How do they get hold of my address book names?

Also should I be forwarding them to some anti-spam agency?

Thanks in anticipation.

[Podie]

Sounds to me like the virus checker or firewall is extracting the content of the message...

I'd give it to the tech bods or anti-spam lot...

[Don]

DavidP.

Some of the text you mention is associated with 'mails sent by the Klez virus. This insidious little bugger infects someone's Outlook and than mails people in the address book. It "spoofs" the "from" and "to" addresses as well - so that who it appears to have come from is NOT who it came from.

Nowt you can do about it, mate. Just ignore them.

Your 'mail system will be intercepting the 'mails...findind a virus and removing it before sending on the message. (Norton for Exchange - bleedin' marvellous).

[DavidP]

Thanks boys. I've had the Klez wormy fella a few times, but the little blighter has been shot dead every time by my [smug]regularly-updated[/smug] AVG......which is more than I can say for my ludite colleagues :wagsfingerpatronisingly:

You want a network? Yeah fcuking right

[Size Nine Elm]

A number of ISPs are now intercepting known virus payloads too, so it may be that you never see the attachment. I keep getting what I think are BugBear mails, which started off with a 50k attachment, but now they mainly seem to be empty.