I didn’t send it. I read that there is a virus that does that. I ran 3 scans, avast (reg & boot) and mcafee online scan. Neither detected any viruses. What should I do? I don’t want anyone else to get a message like that thinking I sent it.
the fact that this message was returned to you certainly does not mean that it was sent from your system.
Unfortunately it is not to hard for email spammers to harvest real email addresses and then use those real email address as the “return to” address in all sorts of spam they have sent. There have even been cases where ISPs have discovered employees selling the addresses of the ISP subscribers to spammers.
This has happened to me too - I ended up changing one of my email addresses (that I never even used to send email) just to avoid getting returned messages such as you are seeing.
If your scans are showing no problems (you may want to try another like Ewido or a-squared if you want extra certainty) you are doing the right thing and are most unlikely to be the source of the messages.
Folks (sadly) also pick up addresses from forums like this one, so I would suggest that you go back and use the modify button on your post and mask out your email address.
Another way spammers get email addresses are from all those “good intentioned” emails sent around where people forward them without removing the email addresses of those who sent it before.
Most good email programs include a way to send email to multiple addresses using blind carbon copy … BCC … where no one sees who else gets it. This would help greatly in the reduction of email address harvesting by spammers.