Frustration with spurious posts.

[Stuart D. Gathman]

On Sun, 06 Jul 2003 08:54:40 -0400, Alan Kennedy wrote:

> But if an email is sent from an individual to an individual, then such
> "you sent me a virus!" emails can be very useful information. It's only
> when an email address is associated with lots of subscribers that it
> becomes a problem. Or, as you pointed out, when the from address is
> forged.

The from address is always forged.

I get literally hundreds of bounces daily from various viruses.  My
Bayesian filter had not yet learned to distinguish them from real bounces.
I did not send any of them.  For the bounces that include the original email in
an rfc822 attachment, this can be verified by looking at the 'Recieved'
headers.  It never went anywhere near my system.  I don't even run Windows
- and these are Windows viruses.

I also receive email threatening bodily harm for sending spam.  A less
clueless admin sent me email saying that he had contacted my ISP and had
my account cancelled - and included a ticket # to prove it.  I looked at
the ticket, and there was indeed an account cancelled at some ISP I'd
never heard of.  Since the admin was smart enough to look at the headers
to track down the real ISP, you would think he would be smart enough to
realize that any From headers in spam are completely bogus.

Sending any kind of reply to a spam or viral email is clueless and
counterproductive under any circumstances.  All it accomplishes is
annoying yet another innocent bystander.