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Duane Morin writes: | Once in a blue moon either I or my wife will get an unexpected email that | says "Could not deliver message to <unknown address X> because it | contained a virus." Never heard of that address, never intended to send | anything to that address. I'm scanning regularly for viruses. And I'm | also thinking that if I really did have a virus then wouldn't I see more | of these messages? What's it mean when I see one, oh, i dunno...every | couple of months? Should I just ignore it? There are two main possibilities: It may be a bit of "social engineering" to get you to reply, and thus verify that your email address is valid. So replying will just get you on a commercial spammer address list. The other possibility is that it's from one of those recent MS worms that pick two addresses from the victim's address book, and send a viral message to one saying it's from the other. This has the "advantage" (from the virus's viewpoint) that the two addresses are likely to belong to people who know each other, and the recipient will thus trust the message and open an attachment. In both cases, the message didn't originate on your machine at all. Some third party faked your address in the headers for one of these reasons. It's best to just trash them. If you want to do something about them, you shouldn't reply to anything. You should go through the headers, try to locate the actual sender, and contact their ISPs. Sometimes the real sender can be found from the message, sometimes you can discover their IP address, and sometimes they've done a good job of hiding their identiry. -- What if the Hoky Poky really IS what it's all about?
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