Delivery Failure mail messages - lots of them!

[falconboy]

Hey all,

I've been getting a lot of 'Delivery Failure' type mail messages this afternoon - 24 in fact since 3.45pm. You know, the ones you get back when your mail can't be delivered because of an invalid address/full mailbox etc.

I was always under the impression that these were caused from a third party who has your email address in their address book getting an email virus which sends out mail with your email address as the 'return address', which is why the mail failure message comes back to me. However, for starters I would have thought the virus would be sending the original message to others in that persons address book, but these look like they have been attempted to be delivered to all sorts of addresses all over the world (brazil, france, russia etc).

Secondly, why do I get so many failure messages at once?

Can someone explain how these particular 'bugs' work.

And yes, I am sure its not my system with the virus.

Make that 29, I just got 5 more!

Thanks.

[flappist]

Your address has been used by a spammer to "legitimise" the spam and all the super clever system administrators who bounce spam rather than delete it are flicking it back at you.

It will go away all by itself.......

[falconboy]

Thanks.

How frustrating.

In the meantime I've manually set my TPG junk filter to send with particular words (delivery failure etc) to the junk box. That'll show em!