Flaw in Outlook makes you send Spam accidentally

Outlook 2007 users may start seeing their Sent Items folder filling up with messages that begin with "Not read:". It isn't spyware, it is spammers abusing the feature in Outlook that sends notifications to people on whether or not the message has been read called X-Confirm-Reading-To.

Basically what happens is the spammer send you a spam message with the X-Confirm-Reading-To header. You get the spam, and it is sent to your junk mail. Then your Outlook send out a read receipt to another spam victim, because the message had the X-Confirm-Reading-To header with the next victims email address in it.

Apparently only IMAP users in Outlook suffer from this exploit, and MS has not fixed it yet.

http://forums.microsoft.com/msdn/showpost.aspx?siteid=1&postid=4038094&sb=0&d=1&at=7&ft=11&tf=0&pageid=0

I would say we will start seeing more spam with this exploited header if MS doesn't get on fixing it. Whenever they hit an IMAP user, they basically get a free extra spam.

I hope Microsoft gets a handle on this problem soon. We don't need any extra spam.