RE: VERY nasty mass mailing

You might want to re-read the message.  It is sent "as if" the sender had
was responding to an email received from me.  The bottom portion is
supposedly what was sent under my name, the top portion is a "response"
which is little more than an advertisement for Norton Antivirus.

Read this carefully:

"Shelly & Jeff,

I received a message (below) from joepluta@plutabrothers.com with a file
2.30.26.zip attached.  Don't know if this came from you, but this type of
e-mail and file usually contains a virus.  If you don't know that your
computer has been sending this message, then you have a problem."

This means that the reader got a message from joepluta@plutabrothers.com,
but thought it MIGHT be coming from "Shelly & Jeff".  Now, how in the world
did they tie "Shelly & Jeff" to plutabrothers.com?  Well, they didn't.
Since they didn't know for sure who might be at this address, they used a
random, generic sounding name in the greeting and then filled in my email
address.  The rest is fluff.

As a final circumstantial but certainly interesting point, the thing was
sent to me, with a cc: to "mpluta@aol.com", which means they were mining a
list by last name.

Make no mistake.  This is SPAM, pure and simple, and of the most deceptive
and disgusting kind.  They could NOT have sent some to
joepluta@plutabrothers.com and addressed it to "Shelly & Jeff".  Simple
logic indicates it was a a mail merge email.  This is in fact very close to
fraud, and I'm wondering whether I shouldn't report it.

Joe



> From: John Ross
>
> I am not so sure it is a mass mailing and not a response from AV from
> detecting a virus in an Email. It looks like an virus was sent out and
> worded to fool the normal computer user into installing it. And then AV
> software detects it when it tries to send itself to another user with AV
> and that AV software tries to let the sender know they have a virus. But
> like the email says it takes any old address, because people who write
> viruses found out if the AV warns the real send they will shut
> the computer
> down and get rid of the virus (at least I hope they would). And having the
> AV send the message itself is not such a bad ideal with always on
> connections. And if I wrote the AV I might put a plug in for my own
> software to a user I think may of sent a virus.