Today my Inbox went nuts!

This afternoon my NS 7.1 Inbox went crazy. A huge number of e-mails suddenly started downloading. A total of 1,884 of them! After trying to figure out what was going on and some futile steps to stop the onslaught, I phoned my ISP's (sbcglobal.net) tech support. I didn't get a very sharp techie, and nothing we did helped. When the messages finally stopped arriving, I noticed that they were duplicates of every message I'd received since 6/23/06, which happened to be the day I switched from SBC DSL to SBC Yahoo DSL. Included among them were all the messages I'd deleted since then, including 21 pieces of junk mail. That's what struck me as odd. If the problem was inside my box, I could understand if a virus or trojan had caused the archived messages to reproduce themselves, but I frequently empty both my Trash folder and the Junk folder. Are those deletions stored somewhere away from me? What made them arrive again today?

I'm including my signature below so you can see what I have for a system. All the malware programs are right up to date with the latest definitions, etc., and all have run scans within the past few days, some just yesterday. The one exception to being updated: About 6 weeks ago MS SP2 automatically downloaded itself but I haven't installed it yet.

Within minutes before today's excitement, I did get hit with 3 attacks. The first was a CC243.tmp JS Downloader.Trojan, the third was the CC562 version of the same thing -- the first time I've seen either of them -- and the middle (second) one was the familiar W32Mydoom.M@mm attack. Norton AV caught and repaired each of them as it arrived. I ran scans with NAV and Ad-Aware while on the phone with SBC, with nothing being detected. A Spybot scan did find some things, as it usually does, and cleaned them out.

So what caused all this activity? Anything I can do to prevent a recurrence?

 

Since you did not say that you did that, try first to File|Empty Trash, and then File|Compact folder (highlight the Inbox as you do that).
Then: find your mail account, check Ramona's Netscape Solutions for location, and what to do. Your profile has a .slt folder, containing your personal info. Your account is in Mail|aaccountname and you want to delete the Inbox.msf file only. That's the header file, which may go berserk. Do not do a thing with your file with no extention. That's where your mail is located.
I just learned today that deleted mail is not remove, and stay, in the background in the Inbox. Do all this with Netscape closed.
Then, reopen it, and see if sanity has been restored.
If you are ok, then make sure that you compact your folders, periodically. I do it daily. But, who knows what a weird .msf file can do. I had a record of 32 copies of one message, and only deletion of the .msf file would help.
Good luck.

 

Westside: Thanks for the reply.

I do empty the Trash folder every day or two, and compact the Inbox and Sent folders about as often.

I just got off the phone with SBC's tech support, and wound up with Level 2 support this time, since they'd never before heard of anyone having the experience I'd had. The bottom line seems to be that I had NS Mail set to keep messages stored on the server but not to delete them from the server when I delete them from my Inbox. SBC's suspicion was that somehow NS Mail "glitched" and sent me a copy of every message I'd gotten since 6/30, which were still on their server, deleted or not. So I've changed that setting, and hopefully I'll never get hit with such an onslaught again. Fine with me!