(meteorobs) msg40888

[metpaper at Safe-mail.net]

-------- Original Message --------
From: Bill Godley <wwgj180 at yahoo.com>

> I have taken appropriate virus-check and password steps and I am sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused anybody.  I did not have an easy password but I guess it was not difficult enough to keep the 
> crooks at bay.

Don't worry yourself about it.  They've only to pick your email address up from somewhere on some online mail archive and put that mask on when they send out mails.

However, you suggest it was sent out to several.  So your address book was got at, which suggests you aren't using webmail or anything like that, but outlook express with its address book.

If you didn't use that and had a good old fashioned paper address book you'd always be safe.  Yeah I know it sounds corny, but M$ has always been rubbish at security, which combined with their market dominance making them a worthwhile target for such people in terms of time investment versus returns means any one using outlook express will be as likely to suffer as yourself, no matter what precautions they think they're taking.  The system nags you insistently with "are you sure" messages every time you try to do anything, often hinting at dire consequences if you click yes (whilst clicking yes just does what you want), whilst evidently you don't remember clicking on any attachments or webpages or such to get infected.

Get yourself a webmail interface account or an email client that is as independent as possible from your browser and you remove yourself from things a few steps.

Webmail clients have the benefit that if something gets through spam and virus blockers and other filters you can still see by eye when there is an email that looks dodgey just from the sender/subject/combination, and can delete it without opening it, it never leaving the remote server and ending up on your machine.

That reminds me, most email clients, and webmail interfaces, default to "open next email" when an open email is closed or deleted.  Go into your settings and set it to return to main list of emails.

Another thought is to always keep your emails text only, set your client to convert to text only on read, and only compose in text only, not rich text or html, though folk do love their html coding, using bold and italics, and the like, despite it being totally unfriendly cross platform.

Having said all that, this one was a link and folk had to actively click it.  The big bright shiney red button with "press me" written on it in large friendly letters is often too much for some, even when they don't know the sender.

Summary : if you havne't got anything in your address book in your email client it can't be hijacked to spam people under your name.

Cheers

John

PS password steps aren't going to make much difference if your virus checkers have missed something still lurking and using your address book, which more or less means don't worry if it happens again in the short term, it does not necessarily mean reinfection, more likely failed detection by checkers.  If it's a new variant beyond their libraries checker list updates will catch up with it in time.  Also, you will find that as these things vary not everyone on the list will have received it, as their personal spam and/or junk filters will have blocked it.  I've seen this happen on a list where the actual admin email (their equivalent of meteorobs at meteorobs.org) was hijacked once and was spamming the list.  Some of the members never received the emails so didn't know what the fuss was, including the guy in charge of this other list, whose own personal kit blocked the mailing list forwarded email so he didn't know the list was hijacked!  I'd never been overly impressed with the guy's supposed tech credentials anyway, and some folk take it too lightly and forget that in amateur astronomy stuff there can be kids present.  Not all spam mail are about helping unlucky exiled african princes get their money out of their homeland and can be quite explicit just in the subject line, without even reading 'em!