Has my email address been zombied?
 

Hello Everyone,

I used to have an email address that I assumed had been zombied because I would receive a number of "rejected delivery" emails with some strange user name attached to my email address. You may be familiar with this type of spam (selling medicine, organ enlargement, and the like.) I long ago stopped using this email address for this reason.

However, today I received a "rejected delivery" email on my main email address that is set up with my internet service provider. This was again some strange user name attached with my email address.

This is very worrying for me. Is there any way I can find out if my email address has been compromised? I receive and send on Linux machines, but do have this address also set up on a Windows machine with Outlook, though I never use Outlook to send an receive.

Any ideas on how to fix this would be very much appreciated.

Bob

More than likely they've again randomly used your email address to send out SPAM. Randomly using someone's valid email address has nothing to do with what that person uses as an email client. The're probably using someone else's email server and injecting your "From" email address, so when there's a reject error it comes back to your email address.

E-mail address harvesting
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_address_harvesting

http://www.rahul.net/falk/mailtrack.html

Thank you very much for your reply. That sounds less serious, but I will research ways to prevent even this. I am grateful for the links,


Bob

The way I combat ( make less likely ) the problem is to use an address that is not easy to guess and includes random numbers. I normaly don't use email for home use, but if I need an address for temporary basis, I'll use a throw-away address, something like hotmail or the like.

Easy Throw-Away Email Addresses
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?si...37237&from=rss

Every day the spammers are trying to find ways to harvest addresses as well as get around the email filters. I recent article I read said that about 95% of the world's email is spam. :mad: