Entourage receiving bouced messages! Spam! Help!!

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Level 1

45 points

Entourage receiving bouced messages! Spam! Help!!

A colleague of mine's Mac (10.4) is apparently sending out spam! He said:

"Sends spam out in huge quantity from my entourage.
I only know because of the bounced back messages…."

He's using the version of Entourage that shipped with his machine. Anyone know what's going on?

20" iMac 2.16GHz C2D/2GB, iPod nano RED 4GB, Newton 2100, Mac OS X (10.4.8), all your iPod are belong to us

Posted on Jul 24, 2007 6:49 AM

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Answer 1

Jul 24, 2007 6:53 AM in response to rdas7

The most likely explanation, and almost certain to be the case, is that someone with a PC, and with his address in their addressbook, has been infected with one of the viruses that spoof email addresses -- in other words they are sending out SPAM (or worse) using every address found in the PC, to every address found there, and some of those sent using your friend's email address are bouncing and coming back to him.

Ernie

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Answer 2

rdas7 Author

Level 1

45 points

Jul 24, 2007 7:01 AM in response to Ernie Stamper

I know there was a rogue AppleScript that could do this back on OS9, but I thought it had been resolved in OS X.

So what you're saying, in this case, is that his machine isn't sending out the spam at all - it's someone else, and he's just receiving the bounced messages.

Any other possibility it could be his machine? (just want to be sure!) thanks for the help!

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Answer 3

Jul 24, 2007 7:06 AM in response to rdas7

I know of no worms or viruses that could infect a Mac running OSX, and be doing this. If using an Intel Mac, and running Windows, it might be possible to infect the Windows system, but since you mentioned Entourage, which runs on OSX, I discounted that possibility.

There is something called micro viri that can infect Word and other MS Office applications on either platform, but this only infects the applications and the documents you purposely prepare and send. It does not send out on its own.

Ernie

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Answer 4

rdas7 Author

Level 1

45 points

Jul 25, 2007 1:30 AM in response to rdas7

Summary of Problem:
Entourage receiving bounced messages apparently being sent from my address. Most likely explanation is that somewhere, a spammer (or infected PC) is sending out messages with my address in the 'Reply-To' field.

Solution:
Unfortunately, nothing can be done about this other than to set up a mail rule/action to filter all returned messages to a folder (or trash) in order to avoid having to manually trash 100+ messages per day.

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Answer 5

Jul 25, 2007 6:58 AM in response to rdas7

There is a slight chance that if you can display the Full Headers (or whatever they are called in Entourage), the return path will alert you to the particular, and possibly unsuspecting, sender. If it is someone you know, you can alert them. However, more and more, the Return Path Header is not meaningful for this.

Ernie

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