PROBLEM:
You receive a flood of "Undeliverable Mail" or "Returned Mail" messages in your inbox. You are confused because you did not actually send these messages to these recipients, yet they claim to have come from you. What's going on?
EXPLANATION:
I'll start with an example. Say you have a stack of envelopes, and you write different addresses on each one: 123 Main Street; 124 Main Street; 125 Main Street, etc. However, instead of putting your OWN return address in the corner, you put your neighbor's address. Let's say that there is no 'Main Street' in your town, so the letters are returned to the sender.... but the Post Office doesn't *know* that you sent them, they just return the letters to the return address in the corner of then envelope. You neighbor will get all of the returned mail.
Applying this example to email.... spammers send out MILLIONS of junk emails at a time. Of course they don't want to be discovered, so they forge the 'From:' on the emails to pretend to be from different people. Out of the millions of junk messages they send, many will be to addresses that are no longer valid, and they will 'bounce' back to the forged 'From:' addresses. If the spam was sent *pretending to be* 'From:' you, then you'll get the bounce-backs.
Q: "Why me? How did they get *my* address? Something must be wrong with my computer!"
A: NOTHING is wrong with any systems that would contribute to this problem. However, a majority of computers running Microsoft Windows in homes or smaller businesses are infected with viruses/spyware. If you correspond with somebody whose computer is infected, then you have a good chance of having your email address harvested and either receiving spam or being the target of the bounceback scenario. There are many ways that your email address could be obtained for use by spammers, but that is the most common.
Q: "What do I do about these messages?"
A: Delete them. You could also create a 'rule' or 'filter' that matches key words/phrases in the subject line and either deletes the messages or moves them to another folder outside your Inbox so you can check them before deleting. (I don't recommend just having them deleted automatically because then you won't see legitimate "Undeliverable" messages, either.)Article ID: 13, Created On: 5/23/2008, Modified: 11/1/2013