Junk Email with a twist

[Hobart]

It appears I'm getting junk email FROM MY OWN DAMN COMPUTER. Can some tech savvy type help extricate me from this bizarre predicament?

[RobertVA]

The devil's in the details.

Some sort of warning from your security software? Email scanning is redundant, since you can scan the attachments and the antivirus software will be watching the email application and the HTML/JavaScript/Java rendering libraries for suspicious activity anyway.

Message undeliverable? Sometimes those are actualy junk mail (SPAM) that is imitating returned email notices. Might require examination of the message headers, sometimes tough to do when using a web based mail reader. Consider deliberately sending a message to a bogus user (but real domain name) so you can determine what a genuine return message looks like.

Of course you should use security software to check the computer for virus, adware, spyware and other malicious software. Some of those make your computer the tool of spammers and hackers in their emailing campains, thus you experience problems with reject messages in resonse to the malware's atempts at "correspondence". There are free virus checks and other security tools at locations like http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ and search http://www.download.com/ (associated with C|Net) for Spybot - Search & Destroy and Ad-Aware reviews and links for downloads.

[mttcrlsn]

Also could be another computer that has the nasty. Many viruses spamming will fake the from address making it appear to come from somewhere else like your computer. Real annoying when I get contacts from tech admins that do not know this and think a server under my control is the source.