"failure notice" from photo.net in my e-mail

This morning I found three rather large files (118-150kb) in the

e-mail box I use for photo.net, all apparently duplicates entitled

"failure notice" from MAILER-DAEMON "at" www.photo.net (I substituted

"at" for @).

 

Each of the three e-mails appears to contain a random smattering of

replies from various participants to the three B&W forums posted

during the past week.

 

While I'm accustomed to occasionally received two or three *single*

bounced messages per week due to folks either blocking e-mail or

having accounts that are too full, this is the first time I've seen

this particular problem.

Lex, don't you know all that viruses we have been concerned with lately? You've been hit.

I don't see what a virus has to do with recent photo.net messages being copied to my e-mail account. And *only* from the B&W forums? Nah, sounds like a bug in photo.net's own software, e-mail, something else. A worm, mebbe; virus, not likely.

Lex, trust me. I have been receiving these things daily from even my own general manager and my secretary. I don't think they wanted to annoy me and get fired. These worms/virus got bounced everywhere. Luckily I have a very updated anti-virus protection, or my company's network will be down.

I'm continuing to get these "failure notice" e-mails from photo.net. They're all random samplings of various threads in which I've participated (mostly on the b&w forums), but contain mostly replies from other photo.netters, not myself. Today I got three such "failure notices" ranging from 100k to 233k.

 

Very puzzling. Before the Great Worm/Virus Scare of August 2003, I'd never received anything from photo.net other than small, specific messages indicating that a thread I'd initiated had expired, etc.

 

I've made sure to turn off the option to notify me of all replies to threads on the b&w forums, so that's not the problem. I don't subscribe to the generalized "notify me of everything that happens on photo.net" option. I don't even ask to be notified by e-mail of replies to threads I've started because I can always return to the thread itself for such replies.

 

I do know that a large number of photo.netters do subscribe to the option to notify them by e-mail of the progress of many, if not most or even all threads. I suspect that they may be using Outlook and that their own computers are somehow being used to scatter annoying message bounces to other photo.netters. But I lack the technical savvy to confirm this or even determine how it's done.

 

Anyway, it's aggravating enough to force me back to using Hotmail, which was essentially incapacitated as a public e-mail account by a daily tsunami of spam.