Simple message! Don't open attachments unless you are absolutely sure who they are from!
What is happening is that someone, who has your email address in their Windows Address Book, has opened one of the many viruses currently circulating and the virus (or trojan ) has infected their machine and has sent out more virus carrying email to people selected from the address book and making out that they are from other people also selected from the address book. When the person to receive the email has certain anti-spam software operating the fake email is bounced and returned to sender. You are seeing some of these Undeliverable messages -some will still have the virus bearing attachment and some will have it removed. Delete all these fake messages.
You can use message rules to sort incoming mail. Start here:
http://www.mindspring.com/~majik/messagerules.htm
Create a new local folder and label it AAInbox. Create a message rule to move all expected mail here and make it your first rule.
Create a new local file and label it ABAttach. Create a message rule to move all attachments here. This will collect potential virus bearing mail.
Create a new local file and label it ABJunk. Create various rules to move probable junk here.
The effect of these arrangements is to sort the more obvious mail into what they are most likely to be. You can then quickly scan the folder contents to check whether any are in the correct folder and, after moving or deleting these as appropriate, use Shift + Delete the remove the contents of the ABAttach and ABJunk folders.
Some messages will remain in the Inbox and you need to look at these and decide what they are. My Rules were only recently set up but I am now down to 20% of incoming mail remaining in the Inbox. Over 90% of those remaining in my Inbox are junk!
Use the From field to move expected mail. You may be able to use the content field if you used a signature plus by picking a word from the signature. This would work if it is a reply with your original message appended.
You can put a lot of spam in the Junk folder by redirecting mail to A.N.Other@Your ISP. You will discover who to substitute for A.N.Other by looking through junk mail received for the more commonly occurring addresses. You may only need a few addresses. Redirecting mail based on words in the subject works to a degree but deliberate misspelling and use of non-standard characters gives problems. Pictures only in the body of the messages cannot be separated from other mail.
Don't forget to include "Stop processing more rules" as part of ech rule.
~~~~~~
Hope this helps.
Gerry
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
FCA
(e-mail address removed)
Stourport, Worcs, England
Enquire, plan and execute.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Please tell the newsgroup how any
suggested solution worked for you.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
