McAfee also asked me to forward the email to the Postmaster at the applicable ISP (Bigfoot in my case), which I did however it only bounced?
At the risk of breaching netiquette by quoting myself from another
thread ...
Just to followup on the info already given, many viruses these days contain their own mail software, which enables them to self-propagate. They steal email addresses from whereever they can find it on the infected system (the Outlook addressbook is, of course, the favourite) and use them as both the set of recipients for further infection attempts, and as a list of forged send addresses.
Somebody else, who just happened to have your email address, got infected, probably by Sobig-F. That system started emailing losts of other people copies of the worm, some of which will have had your email address forged in them. Hence you get bombarded with messages from any recipient who has got AV software on their mail system (and there's nothing that you can really do about it )
All pretty eveil, huh
The sender address was probably forged and it's quite likely that the postmaster at the site you sent it to was fed-up with all the reports and bouncing them... not really acceptable, but understandable
One of the mail systems RTFM runs rejected over 200,000 copies of Sobig-F the weekend it came out. Sending back that many warning messages would itself constitute a Denial-of-Service attack on many smaller mail systems...
