What's Happenin With My Emails??

[BabyGirl2013]

Ok. I dunno what the heck is going on, whether it is a virus or what, but all of a sudden, my email is FLOODED with all kinds of emails from people from hotmail, msn, aol, etc. and their emails are all spam, as well as failure notices, when I don't know these people. The only way I know this is spam is because there is always a number at the beginning of the subject line:

xxxxx@hhhhhh.com Subject: 89hello?
ccccc@jjjjjjj.com Subject: 7 what's up

I only seem to be getting them in my 1 ISP account, and I use Outlook Express for it, but that is strictly personal account, nothing I use or sign up for gets that address.

I also have updated all my AVG and Adaware, and nothing picks anything up. Help?? hehe

[muno]

If someone who has the virus, has you in their address book that address is no longer safe.

Viruses (some) work by getting the address book of an infected computer, then sending itself to everyone it knows, and adds return-address/sender-address from the address book.

So, if you happen to eg. receive a message from a mailer-daemon that your message couldn't be delivered, while you know that you haven't sent a message to that address, your address has been added to the return-address of an infected email.

If it's normal spam mail (no viruses included or anything), then your email address has spread through somewhere.

[BabyGirl2013]

Ugh! None of the names look familiar, and the few people I do email and email me back, none of the address or names look familiar to them either. Is there any way you can make like a junk email thing or block all unknown users on OE?

[Hobbes]

In OE you can set up a rule to accomodate this. (Tools, Rules Wizard..., New..., Start From Blank Rule). From here you could do a few things. For example, you could move mail with a number in the subject to a special "Suspected Spam" folder that you create. Or you could move all mail from people in your address book to a "My Inbox" folder that you create.

There are lots of ways to combat spam/mail virus problems. It's almost like a game - see how much spam you can avoid. :-)