[Techtalk] sent email without appearing in sent folder?

[James]

On Sat, 21 Sep 2002, Carla Schroder wrote:

> As long as we're on the subject of email- are there virii that can send 
> emails from your system without the sent messages showing up in the 'sent' 
> folder? I've been looking on Symantec, etc., haven't found an answer yet.

Short answer: "yes".

Long answer: *most* of the viruses out there are fairly simple 
"script-kiddie" level stuff: "Open mail client. Send myself to each entry 
in address book. Close mail client." However, there is at least one "in 
the wild" which implements its own SMTP client: *nothing* goes through 
your mail client, it just creates a load of UDP and TCP traffic. Not only 
would it not show up in sent-mail, it wouldn't show up in ANYTHING except 
netstat, and then only if you catch it in the act of sending!

Fortunately, implementing SMTP delivery takes several lines of code and 
one or two DNS lookups, so most virus authors take the easy way out and 
operate via Outlook Express ;-)


James.