German E-mails

Fastway · Joined: Dec 14, 2002 Posts: 1951

All of a sudden my email accounts at yahoo and hotmail are going nuts with German emails. Now I am getting postmaster undeliverable messages from both accounts. And it almost looks like both accounts e-mailed each other. Weird because neither of these accounts have any relation to each other (no emails saved from one to the other or neither are in the others address book) No one person I know has either and especially both my emails. So I think I ruled out that someone I know is infected, If it were me that was infected then why not my 3rd email address that is saved in my outlook express. Also no one in my address book has told me to stop spaming them.

Since both email address's use the same first name fastway101 followed by either yahoo or hotmail, I have to assume someone guessed them....

These both are my junk and Spam email drop box's but it just sounds so weird to me that they would be emailing each other...

Any Ideas...
:hmm: :hmm: :hmm: :hmm: :hmm: :hmm: :hmm: :hmm:

jeber · Joined: Dec 19, 2002 Posts: 4198 Location: The Village

Lots of talk on the Internet about this. Check out this and that.
Once again, politics = spam. :thumbdown:

Fastway · Joined: Dec 14, 2002 Posts: 1951

I could have just read one e-mail in my 3rd account :w00t: :w00t:

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,...n051605X,00.asp

nudgewink · Joined: Jul 15, 2004 Posts: 26

First off, your accounts with Yahoo! and Hotmail are *WEBMAIL* not email.
What this means is your messages are stored on a computer owned by
Microsoft, and there is not even a pretense of privacy or security.
If you use a regular email such as OE or Netscrape, you have the ability to
apply filters which will prevent unwanted messages from showing up in your
inbox. See the following excerpt from a newsletter back in Mar 04:

This was probably in an issue of LockerGnome;
the file as originally saved by Eric Schell
is dated Jan. '03

If you have a Hotmail account - or if you've
used Microsoft Passport - for more than a
month, there's something you need to check. Or,
more accurately, uncheck. Quickly.
A small publication known as The Eastside Journal,
based in Bellevue, Washington
w.eastsidejournal.com/sited/story/html/92308
reports that Microsoft has taken, uh, liberties with your confidential information.

A bit of history. Microsoft bought Hotmail in January 1998.
It's still the number-one location for free email:
log on to www.hotmail.com and you can send and receive email messages at no charge.

Almost 120,000,000 people use the system, worldwide. A couple of years ago, Microsoft hooked up Hotmail to its Passport system. Variously known as Microsoft Passport, Windows Passport,
MSN Passport, and/or .NET Passport, all of the names refer to Microsoft's giant central database of customer information.

If you want to use Hotmail, you have to sign up for a Passport - and in so doing you're added to the Passport database. Microsoft Messenger requires a Passport, too. Windows XP nags mercilessly, offering all sorts of goodies to get you to divulge your name, address, age, phone number, and the like, as grist for the
Passport maw.

If you signed up for Hotmail - or anything else that uses
Passport - more than a couple of months ago, you may be in for a
big surprise. It seems that Microsoft changed the rules while you weren't looking. Unilaterally, Microsoft may have granted itself permission to pass along your personal information to other
companies that use Passport on their Web sites. The personal information includes your email address, your birthday, your country and zip code, your gender and occupation.

Has Microsoft taken liberties with your data? There's an easy way to check. Go into Hotmail. Click Options (to the right of the tab that says "Address Book"). Click Personal Profile (in the upper left corner). Scroll down to the bottom of the screen
and see whether the boxes marked "Share my e-mail address" and "Share my other registration information" have been checked.

Those boxes didn't exist when I signed up for Hotmail, and chances are pretty good they didn't exist when you signed up for it, either.
I certainly never gave Microsoft permission to hand out my email address - or my birthday, gender or occupation. I'd rather be
dipped in oil. Yet both of those boxes on my personal profile were checked. I bet they're checked on your personal profile, too.

Details are still murky, but it looks like Microsoft added those
two check boxes a couple of months ago, and did itself a big
favor by checking both of them for all of the Passport holder
at the time.

When did Microsoft implement this new policy? Hard to say. Details should be in the MS privacy statement, but I couldn't find anything. If you'd like to wade through Microsoft's privacy statement http://privacy.msn.com/default.asp#MSNMAIL
strap on your hip waders - it's 520 lines of dense legalese. The last two lines of the statement say:

Updated December 2001
© 2002 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Go figure.

Thanks to ChrisR for the heads-up on this one!

As to "free email", remember TANSTAAFL.

Eric Schell A Plus Certified Computer Technician Berkeley
schell.TakeThisOut@transbay.net