Questions about email delivery failure messages - result of a virus?

Website for more computer virus information: http://www.shelbycs.org/technology/virus.html

Many of you might have received email delivery failure notices, either at home or here at school, that describes how you sent an email message somewhere and it was undeliverable. If you read this delivery failure notice and you recognize the email address listed and you actually tried to send an email to the address in the last two or three days, it may be a legitimate problem.

Recently several computer viruses have almost tripled the amount of email to some organizations and many places have had to take their email servers offline temporarily to repair or "clean up" their servers. So you might get a few more legitimate delivery failure notices than normal while the there is a virus outbreak on the Internet.

But if you read the notice and it is not an email address you recognize or you have not sent anything to that address in the last two days, DO NOT open any attachments. Just close the email message, delete the email and empty your "Deleted Items" folder. If you are receiving notices that you sent emails to some address and you do not recognize the address, then it is probably a side effect of a computer virus that someone else has on their computer.

In the next few of paragraphs I am going to try and describe what is probably happening, why it is probably a computer virus on somebody else's computer and why you are receiving those email delivery failure notices from unknown email addresses. 

What is happening? Why am I receiving notices about emails I never sent?

If you receive some kind of delivery failure notice about an email you never sent, I would be willing to bet this is a result of someone else who uses a computer that is infected with some kind of virus.  I frequently receive some of these notifications as well every time there is a virus outbreak.

I will give a brief description of what probably is going on. What often happens is there someone who has either received an email from you or has your email address in their address book. They open up some attachment at some point that has a computer virus and the virus then starts churning out infected emails to all the addresses it can find on that computer. But in order for the virus to "hide" it's true location, the virus will not actually use the computer's actual email address. The virus may randomly grab other email addresses on the computer and use those email addresses in the "From" section of the email it sends out. In other words, it "spoofs" someone else's email address.

So some guy named George gets his computer infected with a computer virus and all the infected emails that are sent from his computer look like they come from a dozen different people, but they don't have George's email address anywhere to be seen. That makes the infected computer hidden to some degree and makes it harder to track down the actual machine that is infected.

But the problem is that if that infected email is sent to an email address that is no longer used or the address is wrong, the email server at that location will send a "Failed Delivery" notice back to the sender. Since the infected email is "spoofing" your email address as the sender, that "Failed Delivery" notice is then sent back to you even though you never sent the email in the first place. This is a side effect from these virus outbreaks.

So you end up receiving some kind of email delivery failure message resulting from an email that you never sent. But the kicker is that the warning message you are receiving may still have the virus attached to it. That is why you should never open the attachment to one of these messages unless you are 100% sure it is a legitimate notice sent to you about an email you actually tried to send.

Our email server is scanning for viruses and stripping out all suspicious attachments and the workstation you are using has McAfee Anti-Virus installed. But do not be careless with opening attachments because if you receive the latest virus that has been released, our anti-virus software may not know what to look for in the new virus.

Do not open any e-mail attachment unless you are expecting the file.