There are email address farming programs out there. All they do is scan the web and farm email addresses. Then it is downloaded into a mail database and you are pounded with spam mail from “University Diplomas” and other crap.
Best advise is to seriously limit the amount of places you post your email address. Putting a nospam or xxx in the middle of it and telling people to remove that ot post to you sometimes helps as well.
And people, if you don’t have a virus scan prog out there, make it one of your first investments. Nothing says unprofessional like emailing a customer a computer virus.
Posted by TCR_Va on December 13, 2002 at 07:30:03:
I am not sure if others on this board are experiencing the same as I, but recently I’ve been receiving email messages that are malicious.
I believe someone is obtaining my email address from this board and sending the message to me.
The Subject is something “spamish” like ‘Info’ or ‘Happy Christmas’ and the size of the email is about 129k to 132k. I have ATTBI web mail so when I click on the message, the browser goes into error. I am only assuming that the message is malicious. Nothing ‘bad’ has happenned to my computer, per se, it’s just that the message will not display within the browser.
I’ve had this happen several times over the past month. Anyone got any ideas how to avoid this?
Posted by Eric_Tx on December 17, 2002 at 15:44:53:
Alot of the newer viruses will come into your systems and basically try to propogate itself to all the names in your contact lists. Depending on the payloads that are attached to the viruses in mention, a number of things can happen from nasty emails being sent by you to all the members of your contact lists to critical files being erased from your systems and worse. Norton / McAffee / AVP do a fairly good job of catching these and deleting them (which if it does its job should flag a msg to you that the email was infected and has been cleaned) sometimes leaving you with just a blank email because everything has been stripped. If you believe your system is infected try starting with www.sarc.com and do a search for your particular symptoms. They have a fairly extensive database of viruses and ways to clean them… Hope this helps…
Also, consider another email address - Posted by John Behle
Posted by John Behle on December 13, 2002 at 11:57:33:
You may want to have a different email address that you use exclusively for posts at newsgroups, etc. I like getting the automatic responses I get on email messages and so I don’t use the “nospam” option. I also know where email is coming from and who is farming addresses or selling them, etc. The problem is I do get many copies of people that pull addresses from these newsgroups, but have set it up to send them direct to the dumpster.
I have several addresses filtered so that they go right to the “deleted items” folder when they come in. That weeds out over 200 junk emails each day.
Some of the web based free emails are still around that have virus protection built right in. You could set one of those up and never have to worry about a virus and minimize junk mail (spam). You can just search under “free email” and check out the options.
Posted by John Behle on December 13, 2002 at 11:45:20:
Those are some of the titles that the KLEZ virus comes under. I received three similar titled messages today. My anti virus program picks them up and deletes them. I’ve received from 5-40 of these every day for months.
If you have received it and tried to display the message, then you likely now have the virus and need to clean it off your computer. The worse news is that your computer is probably mass mailing it to others right now. You won’t see it, it happens in the background.
KLEZ reads email addresses off of your computer and mails to them and mails FROM them. To me, that’s the worst part. So, it can and will mail out viruses under the name of your family, friends, business associates or anyone else who’s address is in your database. I’ve had a couple people receive the virus from someone who has it on their computer thinking it was me because it had an email someone had farmed from my website. It was “questions@papergame.com” or something similar. I’ve had to explain what the KLEZ virus is to several people that think it came from me. It’s worst damage is the waste of time and hassle caused by the whole mess. I haven’t seen where it has damaged people’s computers, but I believe it may have that capability.
You need to clean this off your computer right away and get an anti-virus program RIGHT AWAY. This one may not damage you bad, but the next one might. You can read more about KLEZ at the Symantec site and their software is highly recommended. There is also a KLEZ removal tool that you can use until you decide on their software or another.
Posted by J.P. Vaughan on December 13, 2002 at 09:25:46:
As you can imagine, as the publisher of this site, I get
a TON of email every day. I use Eudora for my email, and
I can set it to “skip messages over xx in size.” I skip
anything over 40k in size. That eliminates many of the
virus emails and a lot of attachments. I have the option
of going back and downloading the messages that were skipped
if I recognize the sender or, for example, if I’m expecting
articles from authors.
I’m not sure if Outlook has this capability, but I think
it does.
Posted by George M on December 13, 2002 at 08:55:22:
This sounds very close to what was happening to my email a few months ago. I am using MS Outlook Express and received several emails, about 130K, from an address I knew. They turned out to be a virus (Klez32)! This caused a ton of trouble as it will erase .exe files from your harddrive! My p.c. seemed to be unaffected for awhile, but I noticed gradually increasing problems. For more info go to microsoft.com and do a search on “Klez”. If you need help let me know. In the meantime, DO NOT open anymore of these emails.
Posted by Ben (NJ) on December 13, 2002 at 08:38:26:
I don’t know if this is related but I often get blank
e-mails, even from people I know. This started a few months ago too and now I get a couple every day. As an aside, the spam lately is far worse than it’s ever been. Every time I log in, it seems like I get another 35 spams. I easily get 150+ per day, every day.
Posted by IB (NJ) on December 13, 2002 at 10:22:17:
to ask you Ben if you ever got my email about any properties you’re trying to unload. You may have thought it was spam. Please email me back of anything you might have at lodestarcapital@hotmail.com - Thanks.