Question Is My PC Infected?

[MikeA01730]

Hi,

On 3/19 I started getting emails from mailer-daemon@googlemail.com saying "Message not delivered. There was a problem delivering your message to <<Personal information removed by moderator>>. See the technical details below. Account disabled." There was an attachment ForwardedMessage.eml that contained the message "Cum sunt vero" sent from<<Personal information removed by moderator>> Below it contained this information:
Reporting-MTA: dns; googlemail.com
Received-From-MTA: dns; <<Personal information removed by moderator>>
Arrival-Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2019 04:24:36 -0700 (PDT)
X-Original-Message-ID: <<<Personal information removed by moderator>>>

Final-Recipient: rfc822; <<Personal information removed by moderator>>
Action: failed
Status: 5.0.0
Diagnostic-Code: smtp; Account disabled
Last-Attempt-Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2019 05:04:57 -0700 (PDT)

Then on 3/19 I received a similar email referencing different email addresses. Then on 3/21 I received 6 similar messages from the same email address saying "Address not found. Your message wasn't delivered to <<Personal information removed by moderator>> because the address couldn't be found, or is unable to receive mail. The response from the remote server was: 550 5.2.1 The email account that you tried to reach is disabled. Learn more at https://support.google.com/mail/<<Personal information removed by moderator>>.

Of course I don't recognize any of the email addresses or contents and I've never sent an email to any of the addresses mentioned anywhere. As far as I can tell the messages are legitimate, i.e. really from a Google server, but I don't know for sure. My thought is that someone is spamming and specifying my email address as the sender, so when delivery of a spam message fails I get the notification.

My concern is has my PC been hijacked to send spam, or has the spammer just appropriated my email address so he doesn't get the delivery failure messages? I assume I can't do anything about a spammer using my email address, but if my PC is infected then I REALLY want to fix that. The question is how do I know if my PC is infected with malware or not?

I'm running Win 10 with ESET Internet Security. I don't visit dodgy sites but of course I could have made a mistake at some time. I ran Malwarebytes and it found nothing. The PC hasn't been behaving differently.

Any suggestions on how to proceed?

Thanks,
Mike

 

[J_E_D_70]

If those found nothing, would say the spam idea is probably correct. But, you can also look at any services and programs running in Task Manager and make nothing is there that shouldn't be.

 

[xtnt]

It is highly likely just spam. I receive a lot of junk regarding my oldest hotmail address (which I should have gotten rid of well over a decade ago).
I received three of those emails from random IPs in the same day.
If there ever comes a point where you believe you are receiving too much spam in which a filter cannot cope with, you may want to consider a second email address.

If your email address has a simple name which can be easily guessed, or websites are being hacked into to grab customer details such as emails (which seems to happen more than we'd like to know) there is little you can do about that aside from either changing your login passwords to those websites, or changing-removing related personal details of your choice.

You can check to see which websites have been breached which you have used your email on (and if any passwords for any website you use are strong enough) at https://haveibeenpwned.com/ After entering your email this will usually list what data was stolen after any breach.

My emails were

<<Personal information removed by moderator>>

Address not found

Your message wasn't delivered to <<Personal information removed by moderator>> because the address couldn't be found, or is unable to receive mail.

Your message seems to be 'when they are' in latin (google translate)
Odio dolores (despite the pain)
Cumque quasi (and as?)
Odit quia ut (because they hate)

 

[COLGeek]

Never post your email address. Just another way to increase your spammage. Thank you.

 

[xtnt]

They were fraudulent emails relating to 'birdseyedeal.com' which does not exist as a website. No personal emails were posted.

 

[COLGeek]

They were fraudulent emails relating to 'birdseyedeal.com' which does not exist as a website. No personal emails were posted.

Noted. Thank you for the clarification. The original post did contain personal info, that has been removed.

 

[MikeA01730]

Everyone,

Thanks for taking the time to help. One less thing to worry about.

Mike