Fraudulent emails!!!!!

[AnOther]

Worst case this could be quite serious and indicate that your PC has been infected with a mail bot which has harvested your address book and is silently sending emails to everyone in it, if you have your own address in your address book the you will receive them too.

The first thing I would do is a full system scan for virii and Trojans. If it finds nothing and you do have your own address in the address book then take it out and see if the mails stop, if they do then it's some proof of what I suggest and you will need to find other means of finding and getting rid of whatever has got into your PC.

Another thing you could try is to put a ficticious address in your address book so that when a mail bot sends to it it bounces back as undeliverable. Alternatively you could deliberately misspell an existing address, or even do both. If you do get any "undeliverable" messages then you definately have an infection.

I freely admit that I'm no expert on mail bots so have no idea whether they repeatedly recan the address book but if not then clearly this trick won't work.

Remember though, I did say that this is worst case but it is a possibility to be considered nevertheless.

 

[NormanH]

Thanks ErnieY for that explaination.

It's not very encouraging, but I'll try what you say...