Miley Cyrus

Should I be worried here?

Two days ago I started recieving these emails in my inbox claiming to be from the Hotmail postmaster. They were the emails you get when you fail to deliver an email message to someone. They have the heading: Delivery Status Notification (Failure) and they are from postmaster.mail.hotmail.com.

Now the first thing I did was a test. I sent out an email to a fake Hotmail address I made up, just to see if the delivery failure address was the same. It was not. Look at these 2 screenshots:

Here is the first one:

This one is the real email I sent out, being returned to me.

Here is the second one:

This is one of the ones I keep getting in my email inbox.

Notice the difference? On the first one, the real one, the return address was postmaster@hotmail.com. On the other email, it was postmaster.mail.hotmail.com. So going by that you’d think I am in the clear and they are fake right? Wrong. I next looked at the actual full header for the email. Here it is:

From postmaster@mail.hotmail.com Fri Jan 13 19:38:41 2012
X-Apparently-To: ————— via 98.139.220.145; Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:38:41 -0800
Return-Path:
Received-SPF: none (domain of bay0-omc1-s23.bay0.hotmail.com does not designate permitted sender hosts)
X-Originating-IP: [65.54.190.34]
Received: from 127.0.0.1 (EHLO bay0-omc1-s23.bay0.hotmail.com) (65.54.190.34)
by mta1002.mail.ac4.yahoo.com with SMTP; Fri, 13 Jan 2012 19:38:41 -0800

Now, after checking up on both those IP addresses, they are both in fact registered to Microsoft. Hotmail to be exact. So while the messages have different delivery messages, they are coming from the same place. Now here is the thing, I am not an expert on email. I don’t know even close to as much about it as I do about other things pc related, so i don;t know if this is genuine or not. if it is,someone either has access to my account(which I doubt), or is somehow spoofing my email address as a way to get around spam filters. I heard of this happening, and I have no idea how it is done, but I know it has nothing to do with your account being compromised.

Ordinarily in a situation like this I would simply cancel the account right from the get go. However, this is my main email account and the though of going through and redoing everhting is just….wow. I thought about contacting Microsoft and finding out what the deal is but I can;t even find a phone number to contact them. The only thing they have for Customer Support is pretty much their forums and I refuse to go on there and be told the same old change your password and scan your computer crap like I am a child.

I know 100% certain that my pc is bug free. I have been building pcs for close to 20 years and I am not lax in my antivirus or firewall. I have never even had a virus in my entire time on the internet, throughout my I think 11 different pc’s I have built since the mid 90s. Probably because I don’t really use the internet other than on sites I know are safe. So to reiterate, this is not something virus related where my account was hacked. There are no keyloggers or anything like that on my system. I open task manager everytime I turn my pc on to check for any unknown processes or anything, and I make sure my performance stays within a limited margin on various testing programs. So again, this is not a situation where someone got a hold of my password and has hacked my email account. I also do not throw away anything with passwords written on them, they get burned, as does all my mail when I am through with it.

I also change all online passwords using a random password generating program that generates random series of letters, numbers etc at least once a month. The point of all this is I am a security freak, so please don’t give me the usual answers like check your pc for viruses etc, as I can assure you, it is clean. I even manually went in and checked both the entire file system and for registry entries that seemed out of place. It took me the better part of the day but I could find nothing out of the ordinary.

Now aside from completely freaking out about this, what should I do here? And I swear to if someone says scan my pc and change my password I will hunt you down and kill you. Thank you!
@J

Wow you must feel really good about yourself huh! Real classy guy you are! Upset that a girl knows more about pc issues than you? More than likely you just didn’t know the answer so you posted the first thing that came to mind. Typical ignorant people who know nothing about pc’s.