"Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender" messages

[wallmg]

I'm getting inundated with e-mails that say Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender. These are attempted e-mails using my e-mail account to people I don't know. These are not e-mails I've intentionally sent. Is this a virus on my system? Avast detected a virus which I deleted, but I'm still having the problem. I don't think the discovered virus is related since it was a downloaded file that I've had on my system for years and never opened, and this e-mail problem just started a few weeks ago.

What should I do? Any help is appreciated.

[GrizeBar]

Probably a Mail bomb or Spambot Trojan. Send an email to your Internet Service Provider informing them of this, as their system may be infected as well. In the meantime, Google Cloudmark.

[DavidR]

No this is most likely a) dumb mail servers bouncing email back to the from address (without realising it isn't where it came from or b) worse still a trick to get you to open the email and associated attachment to see why don't.

The from address is easily faked so it is possible that it is a friend, colleague, relative, etc. who has your email address in their address book and they are infected.

Set the Internet Mail provider to High, if your system is sending out spam it will alert to too many identical emails in a time period (or words to that effect), I think the default is 5 within 30 seconds. So you would know if there was a spambot on your system. I occasionally get these but I flag for deletion in my anti-spam application so they never get to my inbox.

If avast alerts to this then there is an undetected trojan sending spam on your system, then we can take other steps to combat that.