Just got a 'Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender' for an email I never sent

[NNN0LHI]

Any idea what can cause that?

Thanks in advance if anyone knows?

Don

[canetoad]

1. This is one possibility

A computer, that legitimately has your email address in its address book, has a mass mailing worm. There are plenty of these worms around, the one that springs to mind is Win32.Sobig in all it's versions.

The worm on the infected computer trawls the address book, sending out emails via its own SMTP engine, randomly filling in the 'From' field with addresses that it finds. The content of the email could be anything - pre-programmed message or a chunk of text copied from documents on the infected machine.

I've had a few experiences in the past with mass mailing worms and in a couple of cases was able to work out whose machine was infected by reading the content of the dodgy emails, for example one had meeting minutes that I connected with an insurance consultant friend, another contained some business details of an associate.

Run a full virus scan on your machine for peace of mind and have a look at the content of the emails - there may be a clue there. Otherwise sit it out until the owner of the infected machine realises they have a worm.

[hobbit709]

2. Could be a virus or just spam

a lot of spam does that trying to get a working email address.

[EvolveOrConvolve]

3. It sounds like someone is "spoofing" your email account

To do that, they include your email address as the "From" account when sending it. Most recipients won't ever see it because their email servers are smart enough to know that the address is spoofed. Some email servers see spoofed messages and send the delivery failure notification, which is a sort of clever way of telling spammers that the account doesn't exist (even if it does). You may have received one of these.

My recommendation would be to change the password on your email account to something pretty strong. Use at least 8 characters, and mix in uppercase and lowercase letters with numbers and special characters like the asterisk, exclamation point, etc. Then, run a good anti-malware and anti-virus scan on your computer to make sure that you're not infected with something that's sending the emails.

If someone is spoofing your account, there's probably nothing you can do. Luckily, your email address on a spoofed email probably won't get you blacklisted like in the good old days.

[NNN0LHI]

4. Thanks for all the suggestions

This is an email address I haven't used in years. I just ran an antivirus scan and everything was clean.

Thanks again.

Don

[Warpy]

5. It's usually spam if it's an isolated case

but if you start getting them every day, get your machine checked for trojans.