Scam and Phishbusters → Re: Bill Gates falls flat on his spam

Just a thought...

I posted separately about how my computer is being used to transmit spam against my consent and without my previous awareness. I sure wish that Microsoft e-mail programs would:

1) require a password for completion of sending an e-mail, for every single mail sent.

2) sound an alarm & post a written notice in a separate window any time more than one copy of the e-mail program opened, or any time a single copy opened if it was not being displayed for some reason.

3) have an option to display the number of messages sent from a computer within the previous (x number of hours).

4) let me see the complete return path without having to open attachments, particularly when they may be suspect such as the ones returned to me informing me that I'd been sending out viruses to people.)

5) enabled users to protect their email addresses as trademarks. Ok, this would also require the government to help, but still would like to see it.

Any ONE of these would be helpful, but if the software had all of these options, it would make stopping transmission easier, would enable easier identification of spammers, and give consumers tools that would let them sue spammers for any variety of infractions - misappropriation of identity, identity fraud, violation of privacy, and maybe even trademark theft.

You did say "Microsoft e-mail programs", so yes, if those programs did what you say, you would be aware of any unauthorized use of those programs.

The problem is, many of today's viruses/trojans come with their own internal email programs. They bypass the traditional email programs completely - thereby leaving no trace they ran (except if you have a permission-based firewall).

And many of these programs even try to use built-in functions of the operating system (such as RunDLL or browser plug-ins, for example) to do their payload delivery. Since you've probably already given permission for RunDLL to breach your firewall, the programs that use it won't be detectable at all.

said by jellygator:

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Just a thought...
3) have an option to display the number of messages sent from a computer within the previous (x number of hours).

4) let me see the complete return path without having to open attachments, particularly when they may be suspect such as the ones returned to me informing me that I'd been sending out viruses to people.)

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If you set up Outlook or Outlook Express to put a copy of anything sent into the "Sent Mail" folder, you can easily open it and see how many emails were sent (and to whom).

You can always look at the full headers of a piece of mail by using the Options menu item. It differs in different versions of Outlook/Express so I can't tell you exactly, but they will all show you the full headers. If you want the info in the attachment, you're gonna have to open the attachment. However, you can always save it to disk and open it with Notepad to be safer.

Just about any spammer and/or spamming worm or virus has its own SMTP server built in. They aren't using Outlook!

Ok, so if I read this response and Jesters's (from my other post) correctly, then:

a) my computer is not hosting a hidden program that access outlook to send messages,

b) someone else's puter is hosting a hidden program (virus) that read and copied my email address without ever seeing my email outbox directly

c) the headers needed to identify the "real" sender would be found in whatever message delivered the virus to the other person's computer and

d) they may be one of many links in a chain that would be virtually impossible to retrace through all the headers?

Is this sounding about right?