Was checking my personal e-mail account I use for friends and family when I saw a message I recognized by the formatting of the sender name as being from my old Hotmail account I've had since '97 but never use now. All of the recipients were visible, and it consisted of
everyone in that Hotmail account's address book (no one else), which happened to also have my ISP e-mail addy in it, so I got a copy of the message there.
The Subject line said: Help
The body was:
Hi! How are you?
I started my own website! Can you check it?
It's http://www.sitename.net/test . Did you see video?
Thank's!
It had the footer that Hotmail adds to messages and appeared to have actually been sent from the account.
I doubt it is spyware/worm related on this PC as all updated scans are clean and I have not set up any e-mail accounts since formatting a couple weeks ago. If it were simply a case of a harvested addy being used to send spam it seems there would have been recipients other than the accounts own addy book...
Anyone got a clue? Randomly using Hotmail accounts to spam their own address books would sure be one way to fly under MSNs spam radar
I've deleted all the entries in the address book except my own so I can monitor...
BTW, I edited out the "sitename" for this post while I investigate and eliminate all possibilities on my end so as to not cast suspicions on any innocent site operator. The spam link was a US based domain.