Do you receive lots of virus attached e-mails a day?

Gord10 · Mon 22/03/2004 13:52:05

I have such a strange problem. Today I've received 14 virus attached e-mail from 14 different e-mail adresses. I think this is epidemic, because I learned that my e-mail account had sent this kind of mails to people who I never know! (got the "cannot send" message.) And the adresses of the e-mails, which sent me, are like "info@hurriyetim.com.tr" ("HÃ¼rriyet" is a well-known newspaper in Turkey; so I don't think that the newspapers or famous web sites want to send me virus mails

)
Yes, do you have such problems? And do you know how can I protect getting them? (tired of deleting them everyday)

m0ds · Mon 22/03/2004 13:57:02

Lately I've been recieving emails in my hotmail account where the subject line is along the lines of;

Re: (no subject) or Re: Hihow arew you?

etc. One thing to remember is, that any real mail account SHOULD have a persons first name and surname. i.e, Mark Lovegrove, rather than just Mark.

Also, try and keep track of what you've sent out etc. I hardly ever email people from my hotmail account so I know that most of the stuff I'm getting in it is crap. Every other email I get usually has "s7e" or "FoY" or "Anarchy Pictures" in the title or in the RE: title.

If you've got a website, I suggest in your "email me" tag you put in a subject, so you know you're not getting spam from someone, for example, a tag like this:

<a href="mailto:properbogames@hotmail.com?subject=To Proper Bo Games">email me!</a>

Whenever you sign up for an email account, try not to be included in any white pages or directory listings etc. I'm listed in the hotmail white pages so I recieve a shit load of spam, and haven't yet found a way how to get myself UNLISTED in their white/spam pages.

Also with hotmail you can set a junk mail filter, but I'm kind of sceptical about it because sometimes it catches and deletes important emails, from PayPal etc.

AGA · Mon 22/03/2004 14:02:15

http://us.mcafee.com/virusInfo/default.asp?id=description&virus_k=101083 - this, and other Netsky variants, are probably what you're getting. I get about 50 of them a day, but my virus scanner scans every email as it arrives and removes them.

Pet Terry · Mon 22/03/2004 15:20:09

I've been getting those Re: (no subject) mails lately too. Some days ago I've got this one with subject "Don't open that attachment!" and then there was an attachment with a mail... :

Squinky · Mon 22/03/2004 16:34:09

Yep, I've been getting a crap load of those e-mails with the attachments...

veryweirdguy · Mon 22/03/2004 16:52:57

I know what you mean. Lately I have been getting a LOT of dodgy e-mails from people, but Norton Anti-virus deletes any bad attachments for me.

Watch out though they can be pretty sneaky in how they do it.

For example, the other day I got an e-mail saying something along the lines of 'You're e-mail to *whoever* has not been delivered. See the attchment for more details'. It looked pretty proffessional, but the attachment had, of course, been deleted.

Another common one is when the subject says something like 'Re: Your Inquiry' or 'Re: Your document'. The message then reads something like 'It's all in the attachment'. People think they have gotten someone else's e-mail (somehow) & are nosy enough to read it for them, when of course it has a virus attached.

Mind you, if people are that stupid, maybe they deserve the virus.....

Nine Toes · Mon 22/03/2004 17:40:16

In my Yahoo! e-mail account I've been getting a lot of suspicious looking shit... every day I receive about 8 or 9 e-mails with no subject, and no return address. I opened one to see what was in it, and there wasn't even anything in it. Despite that fact, these e-mails are all about 500 kb in size. I don't know who's sending them to me I just delete them, and since there's no return address, I can't block them.

But... I haven't been able to log into my Yahoo! account in about 3 weeks now. Every time I try to log in, it says "Temporary Problem Accessing your account. The problem has been logged and we are working to restore your access.".... I doubt that has anything to do with those e-mails, but it is starting to piss me off.

Just tossing in my two-cents.

Esseb · Mon 22/03/2004 17:49:22

None to my two real e-mail adresses.
A few to my hotmail adress but the spam filter there handles them quite well so I never see them.

TheDude · Mon 22/03/2004 21:25:10

Anything with an attachment in my inbox gets DELETED without me even looking at it.

Gregjazz · Mon 22/03/2004 21:31:49

Use mail2world.com (free email). I've used it for almost a year now, and only got about 2 spams. Both of them were those email attachment viruses. Pretty easy to spot, though.

rtf · Tue 23/03/2004 01:52:53

I have a local host and I am getting the same crap as m0ds.

Theyre from people called "Homegirl234" and "FriendlyAngel849" They always say "Hi" or "How are you?"

I opened one a long time ago, but then I saw something at the bottom sayiing "Opening Attatchment MyDoom.zip" Luckily i have pro reflexes and quickly closed the window. Clap for me

Evil · Tue 23/03/2004 02:07:17

I had MyDOOM for a while. Its a bitch. 18 hours total repair time.

Ishmael · Tue 23/03/2004 06:33:27

I have recieved a few mails with "Mail Delivery System" as sender, and "Mail returned to sender" or something in the subject line. These mails contain a "trash.htm.exe" file as attachment, which is automatically blocked by hotmail...

Peter Thomas · Tue 23/03/2004 06:34:34

hmm... I use hotmail, and have zero filters, but I still seem to get off pretty lightly.

I only get 1 or 2 spams a day, and in the last three - four years, I've only ever seen three that have had a virus attached. That's not bad for someone who could potentially get anything...

I guess you all make up for it though, with the amount of crap you each get...

Gord10 · Tue 23/03/2004 15:03:42

OK. I think lots of people in web has been receiving this kind of mails for a few week. Do you know how can I have a spam lock for Yahoo Mail account?

Flippy_D · Tue 23/03/2004 20:47:35

Thanks to my sister making our computer horribly exposed and replying to some bloody chain-letters (don't reply, they're just address-harvesters!), I get about 3 spams a day in my previously untouchable AOL account. Hotmail isn't actually as bad as it used to be.

AGA · Wed 24/03/2004 01:21:12

Hotmail's Junk Mail filter, even on the 'low filter' setting is a LOT better than it used to be. I used to get 50+ spam emails a day. I now get fewer than 10.

MrColossal · Wed 24/03/2004 01:34:23

also, removing all instances of my email from my webpage helped a LOT

just adding in a NOSPAM into the email stops the spam and stops unbright people who can't figure it out from emailing me asking them to do all the art for their "wicked kewl game"

Ishmael · Wed 24/03/2004 20:13:41

I don't use the hotmail junk filter anymore... I one day (with the old hotmail) noticed that it let through only spam. I looked into the junk mail folder, and discovered a few important/usual/non-spam messages... My inbox was flooding with 20 messages a day, all spam, and the junk mail folder was at 50 messages or so... I wonder how many mails I lost back then...

Oneiro_Farseer · Wed 24/03/2004 21:37:39

I have three hotmail addresses, and only one of them gets spam. That only happened after I set the filter on that address to 'exclusive'. I use all the addresses equally (I have so many because I'm subscribed to a bunch of mailing lists and I don't want my inboxes to fill up) but that's the only one with the junk mail...