April Fools Email - Not My Doing

Someone pasted part of my April Fools list into an email, and this is circulating around Europe. It has the subject line: Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time.

Whoever is responsible for doing this, used my email address in the "From" field. I know this because I'm being swamped by bouncebacks from people who are not in their office, or whose server is rejecting the message.

I'm hoping the email doesn't have a virus attached to it, but my fear is that it does. There's a link at the bottom of the email inviting people to "Read all the other Doaxes," and this link leads to a suspicious-looking document hosted on secure.filesanywhere.com.

I just want to say, to anyone who might have received this message, that I have nothing to do with it. Unfortunately, I'm also powerless to stop it.

Miscellaneous

Posted on Mon Mar 31, 2008


Comments

I guess noone's commenting on this thread out of fear that they may pointed to as the person responsible for whatever the hell you tried to explain, but first they would have to know what you were saying. Unless of course, they feigned ignorance to throw you off the scent. I myself, am totally ignorant and irresponsible, so please do not include me in your list of suspects. I never lie, Lois.
Posted by Hairy Houdini  on  Tue Apr 01, 2008  at  06:32 PM
Alex, MSN had a blurb for the Top 100 Hoaxes of all time. I thought it was an article but it was a LiveSearch results page. Your museum was either the first 2 or 3 listings. Not the email you warned about, but interesting none the less.
Posted by Christopher Cole  on  Tue Apr 01, 2008  at  10:15 PM
I got so swamped by bouncebacks when a spammer used my email address (also got blacklisted by anti-spam software and the IP got listed as a spam IP in an anti-spam database) I ended up closing an email address. That's bad enough, but if the emails lead to malware that's worse. Can you report the fraud to your service provider to ensure you don't get cut off and you have a record of the complaint should your IP address get blacklisted? I had hassles proving the spam didn't come from my IP address and that my computer wasn't compromised.
Posted by Sarah  on  Wed Apr 02, 2008  at  12:55 AM
I'm no expert but I think that SPF is good practice that stops people sending emails in your name:
http://www.openspf.org/
Posted by Ian  on  Wed Apr 02, 2008  at  10:24 PM
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