Technical Q & A: email system infected?
People are receiving spam from my email - is my computer infected?
Maybe. Make sure that your computer's anti-virus software and virus signatures are up-to-date and
then do a full scan (this might take a few hours). A long time ago in Internet time (that is, a
few years ago in real time!) the vast majority of these problems were indeed caused by viruses on your computer.
Why do spammers or virus writers want to use my email address as the "From" address?
It is trivial to forge an email's return address to something other than the real sender; the hard
part is to get people to open the spam or virus. Evil people want to forge the email's "return" address
to your friends because the chances are higher that the email will be opened. How many times have
your received a "greeting card" from a friend and opened it without thinking about it? You might
not want to do that in the future now that you know the game these people play! Even if they can't
get your mailing list, they might use your email address to help bypass spam filters that check to
see if a return address is "real".
So... how do spammers get my email address and those of my friends?
With the increasing sophistication of antivirus software preventing most viruses from becoming very
widespread, now days there are two popular schemes used by spammers to get your email address and
your mailing list.
-
They scan web pages looking for email addresses. So if you have authored a web page, or written
a response to a blog posting, your email might be used by these spammers.
-
They created a Facebook application or game (or even ad!), and if you click on it, Facebook used
to make your private information available to them, including your email list (they called it
the "social graph"). I believe Facebook has stopped doing this without your explicit permission,
but for many users the damage has already been done.
-
In addition, various websites (Twitter, Facebook, etc) periodically discover they have bugs which
allow spammers to get your email address and address book. Facebook and Google+ encourage you
to allow them access to your email address book to "help you connect with your friends" - but
you might want to think twice about allowing this!