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Help and Support Forums => Technical Support => Topic started by: WhiteHawk on September 16, 2003, 10:17:46 AM

Title: Anybody hear of this??
Post by: WhiteHawk on September 16, 2003, 10:17:46 AM

Somebody sent an email advising me to have a bogus email address in my contacts list as 'aaaaaa@aaa.aaa'.  If a email invading worm or virus infects your computer, you it wont be able to replicate through your eamail system due to a 'undelivered message' error because of the first one.  It seems to me the virus would work its way thru the list regardless of successful deliveries or not.
  Hmmm.. iwonder if that letter was a virus:eek:

Title: Anybody hear of this??
Post by: Tabasco on September 16, 2003, 12:46:58 PM

You're right, it wouldn't work.  Most worms will just rip their way through your address book whether the addresses are valid or not.  In fact, the more bad addresses you have, the more "undeliverable e-mail" messages you'll get back.

Title: Anybody hear of this??
Post by: DAVENRINO on September 16, 2003, 03:09:04 PM

I think the only  advantage to doing this is that you will be alerted to the fact that you do in fact have a worm.  You will realize that you did not send mail to the bogus address when it comes back.  There were a lot of folks in this forum that were having problems and didn't know they had a worm.
DJ229 - AIR MAFIA

Title: Anybody hear of this??
Post by: bockko on September 16, 2003, 03:11:56 PM

yep u can use any nonsense@nonsense address you want, its like the blood from a gunshot wound, you know your shot, but too late to avoid injury. You will know email is going out of your machine you didn't intend.

Title: Anybody hear of this??
Post by: Tabasco on September 16, 2003, 06:46:08 PM

Quote

Originally posted by DAVENRINO
I think the only  advantage to doing this is that you will be alerted to the fact that you do in fact have a worm.  You will realize that you did not send mail to the bogus address when it comes back.  There were a lot of folks in this forum that were having problems and didn't know they had a worm.
DJ229 - AIR MAFIA

Good point.  Maybe I will make an "aaaaa@e-mailsent.com" entry after all. :)

Title: Anybody hear of this??
Post by: AKIron on September 17, 2003, 09:34:09 AM

Unfortunately the worms making the rounds these days don't always use the senders address as the from address.

Title: Anybody hear of this??
Post by: DAVENRINO on September 19, 2003, 03:32:15 PM

Quote

Originally posted by AKIron
Unfortunately the worms making the rounds these days don't always use the senders address as the from address.

That may be true, but if the worm sends mail to the bogus address, it will come back to you as Undeliverable.  This should clue you that something is wrong and you can start working on killing the worm and composing your message of apology/warning to your address book.

DJ229 - AIR MAFIA

Title: Anybody hear of this??
Post by: AKIron on September 19, 2003, 03:46:12 PM

I think you may have missed my point. This latest worm sends email with a return address different from that of the address of the actual machine it is sending it on. That means that if your computer is infected it might send an email to joe@blow.com with a return address of sally@blow.com. If Joe's address is invalid then Sally will get the undeliverable not you.

I have seen a lot of this lately. I am in the computer business and my customers are asking me why they are getting undeliverable messages from people they don't know and didn't send to. And yes, they are fully protected and not infected.

Title: Anybody hear of this??
Post by: DAVENRINO on September 19, 2003, 04:17:11 PM

Thanks for info Iron.
DJ229 - AIR MAFIA

Title: Anybody hear of this??
Post by: AKIron on September 19, 2003, 04:28:10 PM

You're welcome Davenrino.

When this worm first hit a couple of weeks ago I had a tough time convincing some of my customers that they weren't infected.  Their associates were telling them that they were getting virus infected emails from them. They weren't from them but I had to download and run the app written specifically for this worm to prove to them that they were clean.