My fault or just Spam

[Aaron Peterson]

unfortunately, it's likely it's your fault for using email, hehe...  at
least one of the recent windows viruses steals addresses from the address
books of infected machines and sends out mail to/from those addresses. 
It's likely that someone that had your address in their address book was
infected and your email address got abused as a result.  i have definitely
felt the pain of that over the last month, as i'm sure many others have. 
i can't even avoid the pain of using windows by not using windows anymore.
 i have to convince everyone i know not to use windows :)

aaron

> I've fairly recently setup a mail server to:
>
> 1) learn about email and server configurations and all that goes along
> with administrating it.
>
> 2) And being able to recieve loads of email from freebsd-questions without
> fear of restriction on any other account (i.e. loss of email that I want
> to save).
>
> Anyhow, within the month that I've had my server running I've been
> recieving numerous emails that are obviously malicious to Windows users
> (i.e. contain an attachment with some random-letters.exe and nonsense
> about a patch). In short my concern is not that me or my wife will run
> this, sense we don't use Windows, but whether these emails are just spam
> or if it is my fault.
>
> If said emails are just spam, fine. Not to say that I like spam but it
> gives me a reason to learn how to setup a spam filter and/or tarpit. The
> reason I worry that it's not just spam is that there are only 2 accounts,
> mine and my wifes, and she doesn't use her's except to email me and I've
> only used mine to setup freebsd-questions and email her. So why would I be
> getting spam? So then I think maybe it's my fault.
>
> What I mean by my fault is, is my machine being used to relay spam and
> then I am getting bounces from the poor people recieve this crap? I really
> would hate for this to be the case. Even if said emails are not my fault
> how do I assure that I am not relaying spam unbeknown to me?
>
> This is a sample header from one such email. Now I'm not too sure how to
> take this.
>
> Return-Path: <johnny at centennialrd.net>
> Received: from mail.themango.org ([unix socket])
>      by mail.themango.org (Cyrus v2.2.3) with LMTP; Tue, 17 Feb 2004
> 16:06:23 -0600
> X-Sieve: CMU Sieve 2.2
> Received: from centennialrd.net (unknown [196.32.150.6])
>      by themango.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B2194450F2
>      for <luke at themango.org>; Tue, 17 Feb 2004 16:06:21 -0600 (CST)
> Received: from qexstrg (jp [196.32.129.120])
>      by centennialrd.net (8.12.10/8.12.10) with SMTP id i1HLwZHp022746;
>      Tue, 17 Feb 2004 17:58:36 -0400
> Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004 17:58:35 -0400
> Message-Id: <200402172158.i1HLwZHp022746 at centennialrd.net>
> From: "Technical Bulletin" <arvbsichaqsbax at confidence.microsoft.com>
> To: "MS User" <njcs-hgoerlo at confidence.microsoft.com>
> SUBJECT: Newest Microsoft Patch
> Mime-Version: 1.0
> Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="bicnhrvs"
>
> My configuration is FreeBSD 5.2.1, Postfix + Cyrus
>
> Thanks for any help,
>
> Luke
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