Anybody know how to stop emails selling viagra, which appear to originate from a friends email address and goes to everyone in her address book.?

She never sends emails to multiple addresses so it appears someone is able to access her address book and use her address to send them. Dont know if they actually originate from her computer.

Bob,

Is this not a pretty clear indication that your pal has a virus on her PC?

The gurus around here will suggest the latest medication. In the meantime I certainly suggest that she takes her PC off the internet - except when it is needed vitally.

TP

I would take a bet that she has picked up a Trojan virus.

She can do a (FREE) Full Scan or Full Sweep of her machine from such as the following:

Spybot Search & Destroy - Home Page
Trend Micro's "Housecall"

I'd try doing the first one of those above for a starter. Full instructions are given in the event of finding a virus.

Another good bit of software for getting rid of trojan's is Malwarebytes . In some cases they can be more difficult in which case asking on http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ might be a way forward.

Many thanks for info guys, much appreciated.

Just spoke to my friend and she is going to run Spybot later today.

She took pc into a computer shop and they said there was nothing wrong. Do not know any more details.

If she still has problem I will drive over and have a closer look in person.

Tks again

Does she use a web-based mail service? Many, perhaps most, people do these days. In that case the problem may simply be that her mail account has been taken over by a bot. Change the password.

Sorry for delay but only just logged on to read messages.
I have been told that messages only go out until one of them fails to connect to a server, so by making the first address in address book aaa@aaa the process is doomed to failure.

Don't know how true this is and quite happy for someone to confirm it's a fairy story :)

There is evidence that much spam may come from compromised personal PCs.

Our company mail servers use a number of techniques to filter spam. The single most effective is known as 'grey-listing'.

In simple terms, when we get a request to transfer mail to us from an unknown (not 'white-listed') domain, our servers says 'sorry, a bit busy right now to deal with you, can you try again in a few mooments' and we make a note ('grey-list') the sender.

If the sender is a properly configured mail system, it will retry, usually in about ten minutes. When they try again, we spot them on our 'grey-list' and let the mail through.

A compromised PC will never attempt a retry, neither will most Spam outfits.

This technique stops about 90% of mail reaching us.

There's a lot of crap flying around the Internet mail system.

iiwarm, that is indeed a fairy story. Some early worms might conceivably have contained what in normal situations would be considered a bug, i.e. stopping if the first email address was unrecognisable, but no self-respecting worm would do that.

'self-respecting worm' :-)

I only allow self respecting worms onto my PC

Does anybody know how long DNS propogation of a new active domain should take?

I've been quoted 72 hours, but that seems a bit steep to me.

I have had one that took about a day and another that took about 3 days.

OK, thanks Haystack. I'll twiddle my thumbs for a bit longer then. Strange that it should take so long.

Hilary
Try this. It gives you an idea of how well the propogation is going.

http://www.whatsmydns.net/

Thanks for that link, Haystack.

Just bought myself one of these beasts.

Acer AspireM3802

It's got two 1Tb HDs. What I can't decide is how I should best use the drives? Any suggestions.

I'm also thinking of adding twin monitors - any suggestions about which graphics card I should use? I don't play games on my PC - just used for business and trading.

DNS propagation is an inexact science. Much of it will occur pretty rapidly but it can take days to filter through to the far corners of the Internet. Hil, your 72 hours is reasonable - and there's nothing you can do to accelerate it anyway. :-)

SC, how are the drives set up now? You could just use them as basic disks and perhaps use one as the main disk and the other for storage or backups. Or you can convert them to dynamic disks which gives you the options to combine them to appear as one big drive etc.

Dual monitors are no problem with most fairly cheap graphics cards. I put one of these in for someone recently to run dual 22" monitors, and it worked very well. Rubbish for games but works well with normal desktop stuff, and is good for HD video too.

Thanks Jon.

I don't know how the HDs are set up at present. The PC is still in the box. I think it might be best to keep one as the main drive and occasionally back up onto the second drive. I cannot see me ever filling that size of disc, esecially as so much data is in the cloud now. But then we all thought 640k system memory was massive!

That graphics card looks fine - just what I'm wanting, not expensive, and it's good to know of someone who uses it the way I want to. One DVI and one VGA, whereas my monitors are both VGA, but I'll just buy a DVI - VGA converter.