…and who am I to argue. Cogdogblog is on the warpath about… well, why don’t I just quote from the posting:
Spam is a reality, some 40% of email traffic. But there is absolutely no reason for the email scanning systems put in place to be sending reject emails back to accounts when the viruses generating them are spoofing (forging) the emails.
I cannot be the only person wasting work time deleting messages from “Network Associates Webshield”, “MAILER-DAEMON”. “postmaster-smtp”, “McAfee” etc telling me that some message I did not send was rejected
So this is my request (and a social networks experiment). Echo this blog, pass it on, write about it, move the news around the net, and see if somehow, this one, desparate person, howling to the moon, can generate enough momentum for the people who program virus detection software to wake up and change their stupic, lazy, and crappy systems.
If for some reason, you do not understand what I am barking about, let’s try this again. There are email viruses that jump from computer to computer, and they scan Outlook addressbooks, web cached files, and any other document looking for any text string that looks like an email address, quite possibly yours. Then it writes a fake email message, forged (or “spoofed”) to look as though it came from your own email account, and sends itself (the virus) as an attachment to numerous other victims.
Now, the email virus protection systems many sites have in place are actually smart enough to recognize a message sent by the known spoofing viruses (e.g. SoBig)– WHY ARE THEY NOT SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT THE MESSAGE AND EMAIL ADDRESS LISTED AS A SENDER IS SPOOFED? and why do they send a message to the person who’s email address is been spoofed to let them know a message they did not send was stripped of a virus? Are these programs that stupidly written that they think a real person sat down to a real computer and composed a message about “Wicked Screensaver”???
Stupid, stupid, stooooooopid McAFee and company.
Perhaps what is needed is a change in message text. Perhaps the mail message should attempt to alert the person whose message has been blocked and striped that there may be a virus on his system.
If you think there are people who don’t know what you are barking about, you can probably understand that there may be people who don’t know their machines are infected. A note from the virus protection software might be considered a public service in that event.
Or am I simply displaying yet more ignorance of the situation?
…edN
I’ve seen the phenomenon referred to as a “Spam Echo”