Suddenly being bombarded by fake “Delivery Status Notification” mails (about 30 a day).
These come in all forms of wording (i.e. they are not all the same), all claiming to come from different sources.
All have one or two attachments, presumably viruses (one will look like a data file and one a text).
Avast seems blissfully unaware. Had a bit of a google and can’t find anything.
Any ideas? Frightened to go away for a few days or there will be hundreds of the things when I return.
Many thanks
Alan
This is a common tactic to get you to open the attached undelivered email (usually a .dat file) to see what it is all about an bingo your infected.
Or it could be genuine undelivered email being sent without your knowing it (unlikely, see below) as avast would be scanning outbound email and if it were infected, I would hope it would be detected. These emails are usually from people who have your email in their address book and their system is infected. The from details can be forged so it is not something you can take at face value.
I suggest you get an anti-spam program, one that can delete email from the server rather than download the email, whilst these are meant to detect spam you can also intercept this cr*p by either using a filter for say “Delivery Status Notification” or any other common wording or marking it as spam so your email learns it is spam and starts marking it automatically.
I use MailWasher Pro, although it is primarily for Spam it is also easy to deal with suspicious emails. There is a free version, but this only works with a single email account. The Pro version works with multiple accounts.
If you haven’t already got this software (freeware), download, install, update and run it, preferably in safe mode.
- Ewido, a.k.a. avg anti-spyware If using winXP. or a-Squared free if using win98/ME.
These are good at finding trojans that could be sending email without your authorisation (not something many AVs will pick up).
Please send those atachments in a password-protected .zip file to virus[at]avast.com (include description & password in the mail), so that they can add it to the virus database.