Outlook 2003 Hijack

Apparently a spammer sent me an email that would send back to him/her an auto reply; possibly the email in question is trying to forward itself. Regardless, the problem I have is that each time I open Outlook, this message tries to get sent. It always generates and error "sending" because the account by which it was received is not setup to send.

The message doesn't show up in my inbox, so, how can I determine what and where it is in order to delete/purge it?

Thx for any help.

 

Fishn, Welcome to Major Geeks,

You use Outlook and receive "error sending" messages in the outbox.

You suspect a spammer sent you an e-mail. When the spam loaded (preview pane or manually opening), it sent an auto-reply command to your Outlook that sends itself to additional (call them third-party) e-mail addresses? Ever since, Outlook endlessly attempts to send this e-mail, because during transit, one of the forwarding hosts cannot send e-mails. That host is setup to receive mail only. Your Outlook alerts you to this creepy scenario all the time, and you want this endless loop to end.

I'm neither a sysadmin nor spammer. Let a geek smarter than me dismiss the technical plausibiity of this chain of events (but I can say it sounds unlikely because emails are point to point). Before that happens,

1) Go in the outbox and delete all outgoing messages from all accounts of your Outlook.

2) How long has this been happening?

IMO, if there is no outbox, or hidden outbox (sometimes outlooks have multiple accounts) trying to send outgoing e-mail, the likely culprit is spyware. Could a spammed e-mail can even trigger this chain of events? If it could, I'd love to know how. I've personally never seen spyware use Outlook.

Post back with an update or questions.

 

My post should say that the email doesn't show up in my inbox OR outbox.