As worse as Spam mails: Autoresponders

[jecasc]

I use a filtering software for my emails and it works very well for me. It sorts out nearly all of the SPAM or Virus emails.

However very annoying are those autoresponder messages. I get them all the time.

People I do not even know, telling me they are on vacation, on a business trip or wherever. Or companies thanking me for my enquiry or my order.

Most of these messages are triggered by virus or spam mails which have my email address as sender address or return path.

How can I get rid of this pest? Is there any way to determine autoresponder messages from normal emails and filter them out.

And if you are reading this and you are using an autoresponder - please, please turn it off. Or at least make sure it is not triggered by Spam and Virus mails.

[Leosghost]

Are you absolutely certain that your machine or that of someone who has your email address in their address book is not compromised and is not sending out emails that you don't know about ..?

Whilst a lot of email spam is using faked headers ..even more is actually being run by "zombies" and these tend to get lots of replies to stuff their owners didn't know they were sending ..or that their contacts or friends machines were sending in their name ..

Worth running a "real anti virus app" on your own machine ..and looking at who has certain of your email addies ..always best to set up many ..lets you switch when one of them gets on a zombie box somewhere and it starts getting silly ..

Sometimes such things are transitory ..some times they can be a heads up to you ..or yours ..

[jecasc]

I'm constantly running an AntiVirus program which is updated every three hours and the computer is behind a Firewall. And I never open attachments. But I have hundreds of customers with my email address in their addressbook.

But thats the whole problem with emails today. Many people have still not recognized that Virus emails are sent with sender addresses randomly picked from someones addressbook. I still get rebounced emails from mostly small internet service providers that tell me they could not deliver "my" mail because it contained a virus. The large providers have turned this feature off a long time ago. But at least these mails can easily be filtered out.

But not those autoresponders. All with different subject lines and different content.