DentArthurDent

Arend: Yes, I had figured it was possible for my email provider to be blocking the viruses as it seems that they do that for me. I am not 100% positive about this though. The reason is that this went on for a month and a half. In the past, when new viruses were released 'in the wild', I would occasionally get an email or two which my anti-virus software would not initially catch. Then a new signature file would be released and it would trap them. Then I would not even see them anymore (supporting your premise that my provider is filtering them). The timing on this one doesn't make any sense as I had to put up with the flood for so long. As to the source being an infected computer that a) has both me and my friend in their address book and :) was fixed just when I happened to remove my email address from my BBO profile. This doesn't seem very likely. I may have to ask my friend when exactly she removed her email address from her profile as this might shed further light on it. A more likely possibility would be the BBO server being infected with a spam-bot and it was regularily harvesting and re-harvesting email addresses sending out the virus emails. This fits well with the assertions and evidence (timing and the fact that my friend said the senders were all BBO IDs). This was why I posed the question to the forum to see if others had experienced the problem. Note that the BBO server may have been fixed and the BBO powers didnt make it public. I think I will reinsert my email address into my profile and see if this causes a recurrence. While it doesn't eliminate BBO being the culprit (or, more appropriately, victim) if it doesn't recur. It certainly will clarify it if it does. I will post an update in a couple of days.

I am only reporting an observed behaviour and asking if others have observed the same thing. My email inbox rarely gets viruses, but this occurrence started on the specified day and was over 100 emails a day, all with the same virus. Then it stopped the day after I took my email address out of my profile on BBO. This observed behaviour for me and my friend both should be an alarm that is worthy of investigating. The attitude of saying it cannot be is absurd. As to whether or not BBO IDs can have email addresses harvested, I am not familiar with the inner workings of BBO or their servers. But it seems to me that the problem might be rooted in the servers being hacked into. Also, being a programmer myself, I can say that I could easily write a program that traps the stream of data thats comes into my machine from BBO and harvest email addresses off that stream (assuming it is not encrypted). Alternately, there are many ways to trap system calls from a running copy of BBO and indeed emulate BBO to the end of trying to harvest email addresses from the IDs. But a far more likely cause is that the BBO servers have been hacked into and are having the email addresses automatically and regularily harvested. But this is not the main point of this discussion. I am wondering of others who have legitimate email addresses in their profile are being flooded with emails.

I was wondering if any other BBO users have encountered this problem and if BBO is aware of it going on. Back on November 22nd, 2005 my email inbox started getting flooded with emails that had a virus attached. I was getting over 100 emails a day all with the same Virus attachment (avast signature: Win32:Sober-AB2). The emails had a variety of subjects (about 8 or 9 different ones) and senders were a wide variety. Then one day while IMing with a friend, I happened to mention this to her and she indicated having the same problem and that it was BBO. So, I changed my BBO profile and removed my email address and voila, the virus emails stopped flooding my inbox the next day. I recently asked my friend how she had known and she indicated that she had deduced it from the fact that the email address she had in her profile was only used in association with BBO and that the senders were all variations of existing bbo ids. Is anyone else experiencing this problem? Is BBO aware of it? Is or has anything been done about it? Stoned in Stony