Hello:
This is my first post to the forum. I’m glad I found my way here. A few days ago I received an odd email
which appeared to be from someone I correspond with. However, the name was mispelled, and the
message body was incoherent and obviously not written by my friend. This of course was a signal that all was not well. Using the Search and Recover utility I looked through Outlook Expressed for deleted email.
I found an odd “deleted” email in my Outbox. It was addressed to someone in my address book, but it was “from” the mispelled name on the email I’d just received. Obviously, I have some bad code on my computer. This “deleted” file is active and is harvesting my email. I have found no evidence that it is actually sending my harvested email out, although that doesn’t mean it isn’t.
A thorough search with my regular anti-virus software (System Suite/Licensed Trend Micro) did not find anything. I downloaded Avast and, while it found several trojans/vriuses that the Tend software didn’t find, it also didn’t find the code relating to this mysterious file. I have also downloaded and run several
anti-spyware programs (Ad_Aware, Spybot, Microsoft, Webroot, etc. and they have not found the source
of the spurious Outbox file.
How can I best go aboout removing this thing? My first idea is to use a file shredder to overwrite the
Outbox space and then to replace the folder with a new Outbox folder. That way if the code has been
disabled the spirious file shouldn’t reappear in the Outbox folder. On the other hand, if it does reappear, then I’ve got a big problem.
Any suggestions/ideas about how best to deal with this problem will be much appreciated.
Thanks.
