Norton Internet Security / Norton AntiVirus

[Cloodie]

Hi guys

For the past couple of days my inbox on outlook express has been full of messages that have been returned to sender due to delivery failure. They are all to random email addresses and I definitely haven't sent them. Some of the messages have the following on the bottom of them 'This message was created automatically by mail delivery software on the server avasout04.'

Does this mean I have a virus?

Thanks

[PC_confused Super Phishing Phryer]

Hello Cloodie and welcome to the Community.  Are you running any AntiVirus or Security software?  It sounds more like perhaps your email account has been taken over.  You could do a little more searching and find better advice, but for now your might want to change to a more secure password and change the answers to your security questions.  Hope this helps.

[SendOfJive Norton Fighter]

Hi Cloodie,

The good news is that you probably do not have a virus.  There are actually two other more likely explanations for your situation.  First, you could be the victim of email address spoofing, where spammers are entering your email address into the "From" field in the messages they are sending.  When a message is undeliverable it bounces back to you.  There really isn't anything you can do to stop this, but normally spammers will abandon an address fairly quickly - so you can probably wait this out.

The other possibility is that an online webmail account of yours has been compromised.  If your contacts are reporting that they are also receiving the spam messages, then this is the likeliest explanation.  In this case you need to secure the account by changing your password and other means of access.  You can follow the advice given in the link below.

Of course, you should scan for viruses, just to be sure that your PC is not infected, but in all likelihood the scans will be clean, especially if you haven't noticed any unusual behavior when using the computer.

http://ask-leo.com/is_changing_my_password_enough.html

[Cloodie]

Thanks for the quick replies guys.

I'm running Norton Internet Security.

It doesn't look like any of my contacts have received anything and when I check my 'sent' box there's nothing there except the legitimate emails that I have sent. No record of the ones that are being returned to me.

[PC_confused Super Phishing Phryer]

SendOfJive, thanks for giving a better answer that I could. 

[SendOfJive Norton Fighter]

Hi Cloodie,

It is possible that someone who has you in their email contact list has had their account compromised and that your address was harvested.  Have you recently gotten more spam than usual?

[Cloodie]

No I haven't been getting anymore spam than usual.