illegal e-mail

[wolfie]

hi
yesterday msn shut my dads internet connection down do to sending illegal e-mail. BUT he never sent anything. anybody heard of this before? msn said something about spamming and the email was about making money at home. could somebody have gotten into his computer? the other funny thing is when i try to dial in it wont let me all the way into msn but if i hit internet exploerer i can get on line with that.

wolfie

[HackinCowboy]

It's quite possible that you have a virus auto-sending e-mail from your account or someone else has access to your account. I would call MSN and ask them to show proof or tell them that it wasn't your dad sending those messages.

[AlwaysUp]

If you are able to get online at all, you have some ISP that is providing the way. When you say his internet connection was shut down do you mean his e-mail account only?

[wolfie]

his whole msn account was shut down. they make you have to write a letter to msn. asking why they cancelled you. what a butch of crap!!! your word against theres. just to close you down like that. he would have to set up a new account to start over. he sort of told them where to go!!!!but like i said i can dial up and get on line using IE.STRANGE

wolfie

[HackinCowboy]

I'm confused, you said they cancelled the account, yet you can still get online. Did they cancel the entire account or just his user name? If it's just his user, he probably could just create a new one which would be much easier.

[wolfie]

he would have to set up a new account. his old email and password dont work anymore.but when i dial into msn explorer it dials up but when it gets to the screen to log in it wont let me. it says i have to fix my email and password.BUT at this point if i hit IE it logs me on. and i can get to pc mech.

[HackinCowboy]

Oh ok, I get it now. The account still has dial-up permissions, but you can't log into the mail server basically. He could just get Hotmail account since he still has net access.

[wolfie]

wont even let him into that either

[glc]

I would recommend that the next thing you do is scan his computer for viruses and Trojans.

[tx2Step]

Get him somewhere besides msn, never got so much spam and porn spam as I did with a hotmail account. My mother had msn and it drove her crazy, she's got a local service now working much better.

Do need to check for viruses tho, could easily be sending from his computer without his knowing it. But it is strange that msn's email may not be virus protected in any way. I know my yahoo account won't let viruses in. when I get an attachment that is a virus with it, the attachment won't be there just looks like it is. They don't let that stuff in to begin with.

Yeah get him off msn, there's better services almost everywhere. Find out what life is like without 500 spams a day.

Texas2step

[wolfie]

hi
my dad picked aol. plus he needed a bigger hard drive anyways. so took the old one out and put in a new one. the old hd was a 1.9gig. which i think ill smash to bits. so much more room on a 30 gig. and a funny thing if anyones got aol on there home page they have a news article on spamming!!!!. told my dad to read it!!!hehehe
he wrote a letter to msn to find out what he did. i cant wait to find out.
wolfie

glc: i had nortons on it wouldnt that gotton the viruses? or if zone alarm was on could they do the same thing? thanks

[glc]

Only if he had been keeping Norton updated at least weekly.

AOL? He's going from bad to worse.

[wolfie]

I know I gave him choices he picked it.
but it is one of the easier ones to learn. after this escapade he's sort of scared to use the computer. cause he does not know what he did wrong. but he's jumped on the bike again

wolfie

[glc]

I may be an advanced user, but I don't like *any* ISP that requires you load their proprietary software. Just give me a standard dialup networking connection and let me use my browser, email client, etc. software of choice. Nothing new to learn that way - it's "standard". Been doing it that way since 1995 and I've been through several ISP's.

[wolfie]

but theres so many fly by nite ones out there who and how do you choose?

wolfie

i have a cable connection so i dont have to worry about it. to much.

[mikeheitz]

Wolfie, for what he's going to pay for AOL, DSL or Cable really isn't that much more expensive. Just looking in the Chicago area, you can now get DSL for $30/month.

As far as the emails they said he was sending out; it's pretty common practice for spammers to steal addresses, and they are slick enough that they can bounce it off the right email servers and cover their tracks. Also, the KLEZ worm is an email worm that will send out bogus emails to people and make it look like it came from somewhere else. I would hope that MSN would be smart enough to actually verify where the emails originated. If they did, and they were originating from your dad's account, then someone was acting in a malicious manner and MSN SHOULD have been professional enough to explain all this to your dad and help him clear it up.

[glc]

wolfie: If you stick with a national or large regional ISP you won't have any problems - I use Earthlink right now. Locals can be very good - or very bad. Earthlink WANTS you to install their software, but it's not necessary.

[wolfie]

that was his 2nd pick. I got 40 days to talk him into earthlink!!
I had earthlink once I think they were has easy as AOL.

mikeheitz: love to get my dad on cable. he's retired and on a limited budget. I even said I pay the difference,but parents think they aren't suppose to take from there kids. dumb!!

wolfie

[doctorgonzo]

Wolfie, since we are in the same area, why don't you check out USFamily.Net? I have had it for a year and a half now, and I haven't had any problems. And at only $8.99 a month, you can't beat the price. The only catch is that they use a priority system that kicks off higher-use customers in favour of lower-use customers, but I use the dialup quite a bit and I haven't been kicked off in over a month. The only times that I ever get kicked off anyway are between 9 and 10:30. If he uses it for no more than two hours a day on average, he should never get kicked off.

Before I had them, I used Earthlink, and I didn't like it. Expensive and problematic.

[HAL9000]

Originally posted by wolfie msn said something about spamming and the email was about making money at home.

All you have to do to kick somebody outta hotmail or msn is send an e-mail to their abuse account and have the word "spam" in the subject line. They boot you automatically.