Quarantined email - topic moved from Hardware/Software board

[#1]

Today, while I was out (judging by the date+time stamp on them), I received two emails, both starting as follows:-

"You are receiving this mail because you have an active virus-scanning
service, and either a banned file extension or an email containing
a virus has been sent to your address.

The mail was sent to you from:

*       <one of my two plusnet email addresses>

The subject line of the mail received was:

*       [-SPAM-] Scan601

In order to protect you, this email has been stored on our servers
and quarantined.  If you wish to retrieve this, please send an
email to unquarantine@quarantine.plus.com containing the following information; "

I have edited the above to hide my plusnet email addresses, but I got one of these emails from each of my plusnet email addresses. Also, both emails went further, but I don't think you need the full message. Note that it said it came from my email address, not it was heading for it.

Assuming these emails were sent to me as soon as whatever came from my email addresses was detected as needing to be quarantined, then was my pc still working even though it was shut down? If it was still working, how can I find and stop whatever is doing this?

Thanks for any help

[#2]

I wonder whether it was actually from your email address rather than a spoofed address

[#3]

How can I find out? It's not the first time I've had these emails, but up to now I have just deleted them

[#4 · Accepted solution]

If you use the Plusnet SMTP relays for sending email, had you tried to send the quarantined messages from your own connection they would have been blocked at that stage by outbound email scanning and you'd have got a pop-up message containing a signature string to tell you.

Hence it's likely the emails originated elsewhere and the spammers have forged your email addresses into them. The quarantined messages are probably the result of the intended recipient mail servers rejecting the messages so they bounce to you because this is what the forged Return-path/Envelope-from header says.

This is effectively backscatter. There's not a lot you can do about it, but it generally stops after a while.

[#5]

Thanks everyone. I'll stop worrying, and just delete these emails from now on

Regards

[#6]

Moderator's note by Mike (Mav)
I have reset the fix to spraxyt as setting a fix to your own problems without a detailed explanation as to the solution isn't helpful.

[#7]

Fix is still there - are you sure that you did unfix it

[#8]

I have changed the fix from the OP to spraxyt and have changed my note above to make it clearer

[#9]

Can I just write that I clicked on Fixed to indicate that, as far as I am concerned, this topic could terminate. I thought my reply would indicate that fact.

I want to make it clear that I wasn't claiming I had fixed it (which is what the emails to me that followed seemed to suggest [to me] that I had claimed). The solutions were provided by the other members of the forum who helped. My thanks to them - to them all the glory too