Am having thousands of unsolicited emails coming into my computer
I am receiving "Return to sender" emails (over 1,000 each day). I have not sent any of these emails, and they have attachments that they want me to open, but have not opened any of them. How can I stop this from happening? This began over the weekend.
All Replies (2)
You appear to be receiving a load of junk.
Do not respond to any of these emails. Do not open any links, attachments etc.
Check you junk controls are correctly setup.
When settings up Junk, do the following and in this order:
1. Set up preferences in:
- Tools>Account Settings >Junk Settings
Check the following:
- Selected: Enable adaptive Junk Mail controls for this account
- Selected: specific address books (double check that you have not got unwanted email addresses in your various address books)
- Do Not select: Trust Junk Mail Headers - leave this for now
- Select: Move New Junk messages to
- Select: Junk folder on and the appropriate account
Note: You can choose to send to Trash folder, but if some emails marked as Junk, but are not Junk go direct to trash you may miss them or even delete without realising they are good.
Do not set the auto delete after 'x' days just yet until you are sure it is working correctly - you do not want to lose emails that need to be trained as not junk.
- Click on 'OK'.
2. Set up default settings for Junk.
- Tools> Options >security > Junk tab
note: if you have more than one account and have setup all emails to go to Local folders so that you view everything in one place then do not set up - leave unticked the 'when I mark messages as junk'
- Select: when I mark messages as junk
- Select: move them to the accounts 'Junk' folder
- Do not bother with marking Junk messages as read because you may need to read and select some as Not Junk - they are then returned to the Inbox in an unread state.
- Select: enable Junk filter logging - useful if you need to know what the filter is doing at a later point.
- Click on 'OK'
3. Train the Junk filter
In the begining, for each email, you would need to select whether it is Junk or Not Junk. Remember to check the Junk folder for legit emails and reset them as Not Junk. soon the Junk learns your preferences.
If you wish to reset everything and retrain the Junk.
- Tools> Options >security > Junk tab
- and click on the 'Reset Training Data'
- then work through the instructions above.
See this article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_%28email%29
I suppose the subject of the messages you receive is the same. So you can easily create a filter and delete the crap.
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Filters_%28Thunderbird%29
The good news is, it will stop at some point.