|
|
Joe St Sauver, Ph.D.
Director, User Services and Network Applications
joe@uoregon.edu
We've received a lot of inquiries from concerned users about "non-delivery notices" (or "email bounces") describing mail that those users didn't send, mail which was sent to people they often didn't even know.
In most cases, those messages were "backscatter" from a virus.
Having said that, it is important to understand that you likely didn't actually send the mail that contained the virus; a growing number of viruses forge the "From" line of the message by using addresses culled from the infested machine's address book, web page cache, or other files. (Wired Magazine had an excellent article on this recently; see http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,52174,00.html )
Obviously, these non-delivery notices for mail you didn't actually send can be very irritating, but in most cases, you should simply delete them and shrug them off as best as you can.
Many commercial Internet service providers are pretty lax when it comes to dealing with virus-infested customers, so we haven't found it very useful to forward virus reports to them.
Finally, if you're using a PC running some version of Windows, and even though you are likely not infected, please always take the following precautions:
Keep in mind that even though ISPs don't seem very responsive to reports of virus-ridden customers, they do process spam complaints—so please let us know if spam is still getting through to your Darkwing, Gladstone, or Oregon account (write to spam@oregon.uoregon.edu).