Thunderbird email client injecting SPAM?

[cyclone3d]

I know this is going to sound really strange, but I wanted to see if anybody else has noticed this.

I am working on a computer for a friend and ended up completely wiping the drive and starting over from scratch.

After getting Windows 10 installed and everything working, I decided to get a free email client. I first tried Windows Live Mail 2012 (it messed up and stopped being able to connect for some reason, saying the comcast server was not responding / timing out).

So then I put Thunderbird on there.

After getting it set up - defaulted to IMAP, whereas Windows Live Mail was using POP3, I noticed a huge number of SPAM messages coming through... the ED type ones as well as some "work from home", "claim your giftcard", "survey winner", loans, etc.

And there were absolutely none from before the time I set up Thunderbird.

So I logged onto the Comcast web mail page to see if any of those emails were showing up there. It turns out, there were none of them.

Now the only thing that makes sense to me, is that either Thunderbird is injecting those SPAM emails or Comcast's IMAP server is compromised.

Has anybody else noticed anything like this?

Again, this is on a computer that is completely clean. The drive was wiped(cleaned) with diskpart, and it has a clean install of Windows 10 so I do not suspect any type of malware or virus.

 

[diizzy]

It's probably a spam filter that's integrated in their mails server that Thunderbird doesn't play nice with. I'm dropping all local mail clients cause it's a "pita" and webmail is much nicer to use in 2016.

 

[cyclone3d]

It's probably a spam filter that's integrated in their mails server that Thunderbird doesn't play nice with. I'm dropping all local mail clients cause it's a "pita" and webmail is much nicer to use in 2016.

Yeah, I use only web mail on my home PCs as well.

Not so sure about the SPAM filters as on the web mail page there was nothing in the SPAM folder at all. Not sure why it would download email headers for emails that are not even present anywhere on their web mail page.

The person I am setting this up for is not tech savvy at all, and wants to be able to turn the computer on and get to email without having to enter a username and password.

And the Comcast web mail page is horrible to get to because their page is set up so horribly. You go to the Comcast page, and then if you click email, it doesn't go to the email, it goes to another page where if you click email again, it then goes to a login page.
And it takes forever to load up their super crappy page anyway on the laptop I am setting up - old AMD 1.4Ghz dual core APU.

The password I was given was not even the correct one and I had to get them to give me their security question answers so I could reset it.

Just trying to set stuff up so it is as simple as possible for the user.

 

[Haven]

Check to make sure you don't have a plugin for Thunderbird installed, I saw this same type of issue when a plugin provider was compromised years ago.

It could also be something along the lines of what GMail does as well. If you look at your mailbox through the webmail interface you don't see all the messages. GMail does this tagging thing where when in your inbox you don't see things tagged as junk, or social or the third tab. However via IMAP you do see all those messages. I don't know if Comcast does this or not, I don't use our Comcast e-mail account at all.

 

[Sp33dFr33k]

Something's not right. If the email isn't or wasn't ever on Comcast's servers Thunderbird would have no way to download them. Have you checked the headers of any of the emails?

As another test you could remove the existing email account from Thunderbird and add one from a newly created Yahoo or Gmail account and see what happens.

 

[Nerdio_Tech]

Strange! I am also using thunderbird since 4 years but not get any spam emails due to thunderbird. Is their spam folder created on thunderbird? Are these emails going to spam folder or Inbox?