Some sort of outlook express virus?

[cada0310]

Hi there,

My wife is having an issue where her outlook express installation appears to
be sending the same email hundreds of times. It seems to happen in the
background, without her knowledge, and we don't see the offending emails
shown in the Sent folder either.

This just started happening to her within the past few days, and comcast has
tagged her as a spammer and locked her out for 48 hours because of the volume
of email her email client has been sending.

Has anyone heard of this? We've done virus and spyware scans and come up
with nothing.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Chris

 

[Brian Tillman]

My wife is having an issue where her outlook express installation
appears to be sending the same email hundreds of times. It seems to
happen in the background, without her knowledge, and we don't see the
offending emails shown in the Sent folder either.

Ask in an Outlook Express newsgroup like
news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.outlookexpress.general

 

[Diane Poremsky [MVP]]

Do you have a firewall installed? did you run AV and spyware scans from
programs previously installed? The trojan could have disabled their ability
to scan.

You'll get better, more complete advice in either the windows newsgroups on
this server or spyware-related forums on other servers:
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/unwanted.htm#Other



--
Diane Poremsky [MVP - Outlook]
Author, Teach Yourself Outlook 2003 in 24 Hours
Coauthor, OneNote 2003 for Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)
Need Help with Common Tasks? http://www.outlook-tips.net/beginner/



Subscribe to Exchange Messaging Outlook newsletter:
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Cade]

Do you have a virus scanner?
Is it up to date?
Are you sure?
What Virus Scanner do you have?
If it has expired download an up to date virus scanner. YOu can download a
Free One http://free.grisoft.com or buy one www.symantec.com I recommend
buying one since they work better if you are not tech sauvy
Have you downloaded all the Patches for Outlook Express?
http://update.microsoft.com/microsoftupdate

Have you completed all these steps and are still having the problem?

 

[NewbieSupreme]

Cada:

I would follow everyone's advice about this, but I also had the exact same
thing happen at work one time under a Windows 2000 server. I had repeating
emails constantly sent to one person for some reason. I was an assistant
network tech, and I recall there was no virus, just some weird glitch that
the admin had to restart services to get rid of. I realize this doesn't
help a comcast user, but perhaps a tech support call to comcast would help.

 

[cada0310]

Thanks for everyone's ideas on this all of our software (anti-virus,
firewall, spyware) are always up to date and running. I figured out the
issue late yesterday after I got a new clue: A friend who received a bunch
of the emails (which should have been a 1MB picture attachment) said she
couldn't open any of them, and that they were only ~16K in size.

This triggered memories of old email clients which broke up large emails
into smaller, bite sized chunks. Sure enough, somehow her email account
settings were set to break apart messages into 16K chunks. So, one large
email = a boatload of tiny emails.

Thanks again.