Oh dear...

[capri0mni]

I think I may have opened a malware email which then sent something to my entire AOL address book...

The addy that showed in the mailbox window only had MAILER-DAEMON... visable in the addy box. And I couldn't see, until I opened the email, that it was sent from an the Internet, and the full addy was:
MAILER-DAEMON@wllqa.myall.net.

And that the transcript says it was mailed tomorrow morning...

...That '.myall' is making me nervous...

So how do I warn the people in my address book not to open any email that seems to be coming from me, without sending them an email?

How do I stop this?

*just this close to biting my fingernails*

Comments

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

But that's just it -- I never sent any message to caprius@myall.net.

I've only sent out one email in the last ten days, and that was to my aide, on Sunday night. And she's got her email at cox.net.

[alryssa.livejournal.com]

It's really nothing to worry about. It's probably the result of a spam email that went out, with a spoofed reply-to that used your address as the reply-to. Spammers often use other people's email addresses as the reply-to field, oftentimes just harvesting them from the internet or just making them up.

Just opening this email did not cause any harm to you or your machine.

[rob-t-firefly.livejournal.com]

I second this. Spammers use their ill-gotten email lists not only to spam to, but to populate their forged from: fields. So when a spam like that bounces, it goes back to the spoofed "sender," in this case yourself.

There is also spam that simply makes itself look like something you ostensibly sent which failed and came back, for the reason that you're more likely to actually look at it if it seems like the result of a mistake on your part. In an industry that sends out billions of dodgy emails per second, any trick can raise the percentile of their ill-gotten returns.

Either way, it's harmless to you.