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rite_eh

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Computer sending emails by itself

Hello,

I am having a very strange problem. I currently have Norton Antivirus 2005 installed (and have so for months). I have the scanning of outgoing emails feature turned on, so when I compose and send a message from Outlook it is moved to the 'Sent Items' folder and then Norton relays the message (showing its progress near the systray in a popup). For the past couple of months my PC has been sending emails by itself occasionally.  They are not being sent through Outlook but the Norton outgoing email scanner does pop up briefly to let me know it is scanning an outgoing message.

I have done searches by date for files last modified and accessed and can see nothing suspicious. I am running Norton AV 2005 with all the latest updates and this PC also does weekly virus scans by itself. I have run Adaware as well and found nothing that strikes me as being odd. Also the smtp server I use for relaying is my own (located on a different PC, not on the same network). I have checked the logs on the server and these messages are not being relayed through my server.

I'd like to stop this from happening (or even confirm that it is indeed happening) but more importantly I'd like to know what is being sent and to whom. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I can track these outgoing messages or locate the source application which is sending them?
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Jay_Jay70
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Hi rite_eh,

thats perfectly normal my friend

Cheers!
rite_eh,

ah wron Q damn QP!

sorry mate
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mugman21

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ashbury

Can u check the LOGS od Norton and see what is happeneing exactally.

and also check in Event Viewer .
You can also download and run HJT from http://www.hijackthis.de/  Post the log back to that web site (not here), click on "analyze" at the bottom, then click "Save Analysis" at the bottom of the next page, and finally post a link to that saved analysis page here.
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rite_eh,

Was any of the above info helpful?
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ASKER

Yes, thank you to all of you who provided me with suggestions, links, etc. I have divided points up across multiple people. There were actually two reasons my PC was doing this.

I had a spyware/virus application which was emailing out on a regular interval. Monitoring outgoing traffic helped me catch this one. Requests going out on port 80 for ad sites. It was emailing out ad re;ated data as far as I can tell. I've taken some precautions there (changed passwords, etc). Secondarily I stumbled across Outlook in the logs which was automatically sending read receipts (without my permission, which I have since turned off). The weird thing was it was doing this a minute or two after I opened the message (not right away as expected). I tracked this down while viewing the Norton Antivirus logs.

Again thanks for the help and reminder on this question.