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Spam mail from my email address?
11 February 200811/02/08 - Below is a common question and answer.
Q. I received an email in my bulk mail folder. The sender was my email address? It was spam, but not sent by me. How does someone get a hold of my email address and use it for spam? How can I stop this from happening?
A. If you remember when you setup your email client you were able to have your name show up any way you liked? Well entering the “reply-to” email address is a similar field which is optional to the sender… in other words, anything can be put there.
There is a proper way to read SPAM mail… this is done by viewing “full header” information. refer to your email client help for details, its usually in the options menu.[all email clients have different locations]
Now you will see all of the gobbledygook above the message body… stuff like x-originating ip and received by ip etc… etc… Some of this can also be faked or “spoofed”. However it is much harder to spoof this information. If you know how to perform a WHOIS lookup on IP addresses you can forward the email also to the ISP where it is truly originating from.
The main thing to remember is to NEVER click on the links in the email. !!! If you hover your mouse over the links or images you will probably notice that the ACTUAL link it will be going to is quite different than you expected. I strongly urge you to invest in or ensure your security suite is up to date which will protect you from accidental clicks and malicious attacks.
About message headers
E-mail message headers provide a list of technical details about the message, such as who sent it, the software used to compose it, and the e-mail servers that it passed through on its way to the recipient.
After you compose a message and send it, the message is processed by the e-mail server at your Internet service provider (ISP). If the message is for someone who does not have a mailbox on your e-mail server, the server forwards the message to another e-mail server. The message is forwarded from server to server. It may go through several e-mail servers until it reaches the e-mail server on which the recipient of the message has a mailbox.
From the time when the message is first created, information about it is added to a hidden section of the message known as the Internet header. The information includes technical details, such as who created the message, the software used to compose it, and the e-mail servers it passed through on its way to the recipient. You can use these details to identify problems with the e-mail message or help discover the sources of unsolicited commercial e-mail messages.
Note The practice of providing false information in message headers is a growing problem. This is also known as spoofing. For example, a message might indicate that it is from Eric Lang at Alpine Ski House (you@yourdomain.com) when it is actually from a bulk e-mail service that promotes schemes to get rich quickly. Therefore, before you send an angry reply to someone complaining about his or her message, remember that the header information might be forged.
We run spam filters as will your ISP but spam mers are always coming up with new ways of sending it. Understand it may be a friends infected computer that has had its address book infected by a worm or virus and if your email address is in it then you end up on spam lists.
There is no magic solution. Just delete any emails like this and move on.
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