 | Chris Owen
is President and founder of Hubris Communications. Until the opening of Hubris' Wichita office, Mr. Owen was the sole network technician and systems administrator of the company. Hubris Communications is a provider of premium Dial-Up, ADSL, SDSL, Wireless, and dedicated Internet Services. Founded in Garden City, Kansas and doing business since July 1995, Hubris Communications, Inc. serves over 3,200 customers in south central and southwestern Kansas. Chris can be reach at (316) 858-3000 or owenc@hubris.net |
Computers & Software
2002-11-01 16:36:00
I didn’t send them out!
QUESTION: The other day I received 18 e-mails from people I do not know saying that they had received a junk e-mail from me. I didn't send out anything. What's up with this?
ANSWER: There are several possible causes of this problem. The first is that someone out there has actually used your return address to send out junk email. Most people don't realize it but it is very easy to forge the return address on an email.If this has happened your best bet will probably be to report this to your internet service provider. They should be able to help track down who did this and if you are using an email address under their domain name they may also be very interested in finding out exactly who is forging their address.Another possibility is that the email your correspondents received is not actually junk email but was caused by a virus on someone else's computer. The newest generation of email based viruses will often forge the return address that the email is coming from. So if person B is infected and has email addresses for person A and person C in their address book, the virus will send mail from person A to person C. This mail is actually from person B but appears to person C to have come from you (person A).Unfortunately, there may not be much you can do about this particular problem. The person whose computer is infected probably has no idea their computer is infected or is sending out these emails. Again your best bet may be to contact your internet provider for assistance in tracking the source of the email.The last possibility is that it is your computer that is infected with a virus and you (or your computer) is actually sending out theseemails without you knowing it. This is probably the worst possibility, but fortunately the easiest to fix.Regardless of this particular problem, if your computer is connected to the internet you MUST have an antivirus program installed on your computer. However, just having a virus program installed is not enough. You also need to update that virus software at least weekly in order to have it really do much good. With most antivirus software running under $50 it is a must have purchase for a computer on the internet.One last thing you can do to make sure that you don't fall victim to this problem is choose an internet provider that scans all incoming (and preferably outgoing) email for these type of viruses. ISPs that do this type of scanning will update their virus definitions daily. This will give you the absolute best chance of avoiding these type of problems. Such scanning probably doesn't mean you can skip getting your own antivirus software but it will stop almost all of these type of viruses.
