URGENT WARNING - ALL READ

[GordMay]

DO NOT OPEN ANY E-MAIL FROM ME < Gord @ BoatPro . zzn . com >
DELETE ANYTHING, FROM ME, UNOPENED.
I've recieved several hundred "mailer daemons" this AM, all from "strange" (to me) addresses.
I'm not sending out any emails, from my Gord@BoatPro address, until I've cleaned up my act.
Sorry if anyone's been inconvenienced.

[Wotname]

Thanks for the heads up.

[hooked on water]

Thanks gord will do
these viruses are a nightmare
good luck
Hooked

[GMac]

A mate opened his email a few weeks back to find over 900 emails being bounced back at him from spam grabbing software, in one night. A week later he was still getting bounced 100's of emails and a few replied to with nasty comments about is heritage.

Someone spammed and spoofed his email address. Nasty stuff really especially as it was a company one, not a good look.

[Paul Elliott]

Gordon,

It may be that the emails were not sent from your computer, or with your account. Often a spam outfit harvests email addresses and domains, and puts these in the "reply to" or even the "from" header in their email. I often get these "undeliverable" responses from various daemons, where someone has used a ficticious_account@ a_domain_of_mine. They will also use your valid email address if they can find it. Since the email they are sending has a "click here" button, or embedded link, the "reply to" and "from" fields don't matter -- but they are required for the email protocol. I suppose they figure it is harder to block them if they use someone else's address.

If this is what is going on then it's not a virus at your end, the email is not actually coming from you, and there is nothing you can do about it. The spammers usually change the pirated email address they use pretty frequently, so it will probably go away in a few days.

Of course, if you actually have an infection, or a "zombie" program has taken over your server, then you will need to hunt it down and kill it.

[GordMay]

Paul:
Thanks for the information. It was driving me crazy, yesterday; but no new return bounces today - so perhaps ...

[Lancerbye]

There is a cartoon card about getting a priest to excersise [sic: exorcise] your computer to drive the demons out. I wish it would copy over.

[ssullivan]

I'll open your nasty, filthy attachments, Gord. I'm on a Mac.

Ha ha.

Seriously, it can be quite a headache (and somewhat embarassing) when that kind of thing happens. Hope it's not causing you too much grief.

A Mac!?!?!?! Well, that explains allot OK, have to admit, after using Vista for the past year, I have been paying more attention to those Mac commercials

[ssullivan]

Originally Posted by Kai Nui

A Mac!?!?!?! Well, that explains allot OK, have to admit, after using Vista for the past year, I have been paying more attention to those Mac commercials

Yup... when I owned that software company in Manhattan (pre 9/11), as OSX was coming out, we switched the entire company to run on Macs because they were more reliable in general.

I made that decision because I couldn't afford to have my developers off the hourly billable projects troubleshooting our own systems. To eliminate the need for internal technical support, I switched the whole company over.

I haven't owned a PC since.

We did have keep many development machines as PCs, but all administrative, executive (if you can call it that in a 16 person software company), management, and servers all ran OSX, including OSX server running on a very souped up machine at the time. This is where we hosted our company music server for the developers to tap into and have fun while working. Even some of our development machines were Macs because we had a few Mac development projects for local restaurant chains in Manhattan. (Burritoville if you NYers are curious) They run on Macs.

Many of us that worked at my company were also UNIX freaks and enjoyed the nostalga of being able to fire up emacs or Pico in our laptops.

Since those days, I can't imagine having to deal with all those viruses, bugs, segmantation faults, etc...

But... I hope nobody reads this and gets a Mac because then I'll be stuck with viruses again. haha

Only draback: Even though he doesn't seem as evil, make no mistake - Steve Jobs is MORE evil than Bill Gates! He locks you into upgrades that cost big money.

[jim lee]

Same choice here About 20 years ago I'd decided I'd rather use my computer than work on it. Had Macs ever since. We have both macs & PCs at the house. The kids aren't allowed on the internet with the PCs. Macs, no problem.

-jim lee

[scallywag]

Well, I just can not get myself to buy a Mac. The company changes its hardware and software so often I can not afford the upgrades. As soon as Macs rule, the GEEKS will start writing viruses for the Mac.

John

Boy did I derail THIS thread. Sorry about that Gord. FWIW, I am either not on your email list, or it just never got to me.

[clausont]

Do a google search on "Reverse NDR Attack" (non-delivery report). Has a lot of discussion on this type of spam and very good information. We have had this problem on the network that I manage.

[colemj]

Originally Posted by scallywag

The company changes its hardware and software so often I can not afford the upgrades.

This doesn't make sense. Or at least it makes the same amount of sense as applied to any computer/software combo. At work I use a 7 year old Mac running the latest software for it - no problems. Up until a month ago, my home Mac was 8 years old running the latest software (I'm typing this on my one month old Mac laptop - which I bought only because I needed a laptop). My PC at work has been changed out twice in that time because it could no longer keep up with the software requirements (same requirements the Mac has no problem with). The software upgrades are not the provence of the hardware manufacture. I did change the Mac OS from OS9 to OSX (can you imagine upgrading to Vista on a machine designed for Win95? ). The cost was $129. The PC has been upgraded by default when the new PC was bought because the old one struggled, so that upgrade cost >$1,000. Even if I simply changed the operating system, the cost would have been more than twice that of the Mac. All software updates on both machines were dictated by Microsoft and had nothing to do with the box manufacture. If you are looking for a company that keeps you on an update treadmill, look toward Redmond, not Cupertino.

Here's the strange thing about my new Mac laptop - it is running Windows! Two flavors of Windows simultaneously. And of course Unix and MacOS simultaneously also. The boat had a central PC hooked up to all of the navigation (Nobeltec), remote monitor, remote speakers, wind, autopilot, SSB, etc. I removed it, took the new Mac onboard, hooked all of the equipment serial ports from the old PC up to a USB-Serial adapter, plugged the one USB cable into the Mac and presto, everything works!

And most likely will for the next 7 years...