Help! I am a secret spammer

[Chuchinchow]

I woke up this morning to find my in-box full of irate messages from some of my regular correspondents, complaining that I had sent four consecutive spam messages to them.

I am more than surprised, because I have the following prophylactic software programs installed on my computer:

AVG - paid and totally up to date
Ad-Aware - ditto
CCleaner - up to date
Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware - paid and totally up to date
RegCure - ditto
Spybot - totally up to date

Would some kind soul please tell me where I am going wrong and what more I could do to prevent any further unwanted transmissions of spam?

Thanks in advance.

[risk]

Dear unwitting Spammer

Depends what the spam message was...

Recently, a lot of the spamming webites use a different approach than usual.

They send out an email from their servers but using your name in their account names & the email address. The domain name obviously will be different, but this evades many anti-spamming policies running on online email clients like Hotmail, Yahoo etc... Sometimes they even evade the local anti-spamware too as some of these anti-spamware cross-checks the username with your address book & since the name is the same, it lets it get through...

So:
It might not be you...
It might not be your computer...
It might not be your programs...

It might just be clever people out there using their brilliance for the 'not-so-good' purposes....

[Mike-Bracknell]

Originally Posted by risk

Depends what the spam message was...

Recently, a lot of the spamming webites use a different approach than usual.

They send out an email from their servers but using your name in their account names & the email address. The domain name obviously will be different, but this evades many anti-spamming policies running on online email clients like Hotmail, Yahoo etc... Sometimes they even evade the local anti-spamware too as some of these anti-spamware cross-checks the username with your address book & since the name is the same, it lets it get through...

So:
It might not be you...
It might not be your computer...
It might not be your programs...

It might just be clever people out there using their brilliance for the 'not-so-good' purposes....

It's not so recent.
It's also not necessarily that "The domain name obviously will be different" as anyone with an open relay can send an email message to anyone else purporting to be from anyone (as I found many moons ago on my computer course when running to the dean to be asked why I had been thrown off the course only to be told that he knew nothing of the email I, and many of my classmates had received that purported to be from him).
Hence, don't let it get you down, you've probably just been advertising your email address somewhere and it's been harvested and used for this purpose. Don't let anyone else blame you either, but a cursory scan of your computer might be a good idea.

[Gertrude the Wombat]

Would some kind soul please tell me where I am going wrong and what more I could do to prevent any further unwanted transmissions of spam?

Quite likely this is a bog standard Joe-job (qv). You haven't done anything wrong, and there is nothing you can do about it. They usually run for around 72 hours.

[Chuchinchow]

Quite likely this is a bog standard Joe-job (qv).

Thank you for adding both to my vocabulary and to the sum total of my knowledge!

You haven't done anything wrong, and there is nothing you can do about it. They usually run for around 72 hours.

I appreciate your words of consolation, but they sound ominously like my (elderly) family doctor when I was a child, airily dismissing my latest malady as, "Oh don't worry; it's just a virus"!

Thanks to all who have offered advice and comfort so far.

[le Pingouin]

If they use a particular address for more than a few days it becomes increasingly effectively blocked by spam filtering, so they move on. They'd be on a hiding to nothing to continue using it when there are millions of other addresses available.

[BOAC]

Chuch - I would suggest it is probably best not to investigate other meanings of the expression.........oh, I don't know Happy days.

[goudie]

Reading this thread has put my mind at rest 'cos the very same thing has just happened to me. I was wondering how it could have happened but I've now changed my password and deleted my contact list, for the time being, at least.