[luau] Windows hoaxes?

yuser at hi.net yuser at hi.net
Tue Nov 19 17:40:01 PST 2002


It does not matter how the virus sends the mail, all at once in the 
to field, individually, reverse order, random blah blah, none of it 
matters..  Having a bogus address in your address book will not stop 
any of them.

Your mail client never connects to the intended receipients mail 
server.  Your mail client does not get put into a "hold" status 
waiting to verify that an email was successfully sent to the intended 
reciepient.  When sending mail, your client (Pine, elm, Outlook, 
Eudora etc) connects to your SMTP server and drops the mail, the 
server sends an acknowledgement to your client that yes, I did get 
your outgoing mail, disconnects you and forwards it on, your client 
has now returned to operation fully ready to send more.  The only 
indication you will ever get about a bad email address is from the 
final reciepients mail server if the user did not exist, or from your 
mail server stating the domain could not be found (there are others 
but beyond the scope).  Either way, your mail client knows nothing of 
this (other then you getting a new mail) and can still be happily 
sending out hundreds more.  

In simpler terms...

Compose a mail to fake_address at fakedomain.com, send it then create 
one to your friend.  Did Outlook, Pine, Elm etc.. stop or prevent the 
mail from getting to your friend because the fake_address did not get 
through?  No, all you got was a new email from postmaster at somedomain 
saying your mail to fake_address was undeliverable..  Same thing with 
the virus accessing your address book.  You may get a bounce back but 
the others got through fine...

On 19 Nov 2002 at 13:11, Jim wrote:

> This ruse has been touted for quite some time,sometimes they just tell 
> you to put your address at top so you will have a warning.Upshot is it
> precludes; does the worm/virus only sent one e-mail at a time,does it 
> start secquencially from first to last? (must make sure the black hats 
> follow the rules)It's very similar to one of those dice-o-matics sold on 
> TV..looks great till you buy it. :-)





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