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Virus in emails
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Posted by: matapp
I'm receiving Mailer-Daemon emails from people that I've never sent an email to. I also get notices about viruses. I've checked my computer at home and have found no viruses. My assistant does all my emails from the computer in our office which also has no viruses. Is AOL fighting a virus that affects our emails?
Posted by: Shalome
The entire internet is fighting a virus variant named SoBig.F. Fear not, this worm deactivates itself on Sep. 10th, so you should stop getting those e-mails soon.
The reason you are getting those emails is because the virus 'spoofs' other people's email addresses. Example: Andy has Bob, Chris, and Dave's email addresses saved on his hard drive. Andy gets the SoBig.F virus. The virus sends emails from Andy's computer, but they are addressed FROM Bob, Chris, or Dave -- never from Andy. Weird, eh?
So say Alice gets an e-mail 'from Bob' with a virus attached. She e-mails Bob saying "hey, you have a virus!" Bob checks his computer and doesn't find a virus. That's because the email ACTUALLY came from Andy's computer... it just pretended to be from Bob.
That's the same reason that you're getting the mailer-daemon messages -- the mail server doesn't know that the email came from Andy's computer, all it sees is Bob's address in the FROM line. So the daemon bounces the email back to Bob.
Make sense? Even if it didn't, the virus self-destructs tomorrow and stops sending out those e-mails. 
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