Please Help Me

[Jason Humphries]

I have been receiving emails alledgedly from Microsoft claiming to
have the latest updates and Net patches. I am getting about 70 of
these a day and they are clogging up my inbox and my server at work.

They contain a virus and whilst it does not affect my Mac, this amount
of unsolicited email is driving me mental. I have tried looking at the
mail headers to see if I can recognise where they are coming from, but
there is not a common source, and every one seems to be coming from
somewhere else.

I assume that this is some sort of "spoofing", but what can I do to
stop them.

Any suggestions will be gratefully received.

Many thanks

Jason

 

[J.E. McGimpsey]

I have been receiving emails alledgedly from Microsoft claiming to
have the latest updates and Net patches. I am getting about 70 of
these a day and they are clogging up my inbox and my server at work.

They contain a virus and whilst it does not affect my Mac, this amount
of unsolicited email is driving me mental. I have tried looking at the
mail headers to see if I can recognise where they are coming from, but
there is not a common source, and every one seems to be coming from
somewhere else.

I assume that this is some sort of "spoofing", but what can I do to
stop them.

Any suggestions will be gratefully received.

First, this is due to the Swen ("News", backward) worm, which
infects PCs, but creates spam for everyone. For suggestions on how
to minimize this when posting, check out the Microsoft Newsgroup
Rules of Conduct link at

http://www.microsoft.com/mac/community/community.aspx?pid=newsgroups

Unfortunately, after you've posted, the horse has left the barn. A
couple of suggestions:

See if your ISP offers a spam filtering option - that's the only
reason I keep using my mvps.org address. Before its filters were
updated I was receiving thousands of Swen-related spams a day. (I
still get dozens).

Also, check out shareware and commercial spam filtering
applications. I use SpamSieve, and it catches 90+% of the spam that
I receive.

Be aware that no matter how bad it gets initially, the Swen-related
spam will drop off as time passes. Swen harvests addresses directly
from servers, not from the archives, so as your message drops off
the servers (usually from days to weeks), the traffic will drop off
too.

You can read more about Swen at

http://symantec.com/avcenter/venc/data/[email protected]