email from myself?

I get them like that all the time. It's just another (sigh) form of spam.

There's a way to switch the "sent from" part of the e-mail using the receiver's name; I've seen the format but I've never played around with it.

CACTUSWENDY said:

I just did a check on one of my email accounts and it seems I sent myself one. lol I opened it and it was some spam for some meds. My question is....how did it have my addy as the sender address? This is the first time it has ever happened to me. Is there something I need to do to make sure this does not happen again? Is my account at risk? Any info would be great.

Thanks....

Click to expand...

Because technically it is very easy to forge any email address as the sender in the "From:" and/or "Reply To:" fields of an email. Spammers forge all kinds of addresses, existent or nonexistent, in the From: field. It's as easy (for a spamming program, and it sends thousands at a time, millions a day or hour) to copy the address in the To: field and put into the From: field as to do anything else. But it goes to show you can't trust the From: field. It only works in ordinary emails because people who send legitimate email WANT you to have their address in the From: field so you can reply.

There's virtually nothing you can do about it (other than get a new email address, which will be as vulnerable to spam as this one, presuming you do all the same things with it). Your account is almost certainly not at risk (other than the chance of getting more spam).

One weekend about seven years ago I got several hundred spam "bounces" per day in my inbox, probably over a thousand over the weekend. It was clear that a spammer used MY email address as the "From:" address in spam sent to thousands, and I only got the ones sent to addresses that never existed or that had been closed. I would have liked to think it was "revenge" for my antispam activities over the years, but it's more likely that my address was grabbed at random out of the spammed addresses to go into the From: field. A true "revenge" act would have result in thousands of spam bounces per hour.

This is the equivalent of having your own address written on upper left hand corner of your junk mail. If you want to see where it really comes from, you can see the equivalent of the postmarks by viewing headers. How you do this depends on your e-mail client. However you can also (sort of) forge headers by putting what appears to be a header into the mail, this is equivalent to writing bogus postmarks on the envelope. But there are utilities that can straighten it out for you if necessary.

Just an FYI. Email addresses can also be harvested from websites, forums and other places (so watch carefully who you give your email addresses to). If your homepage has your address on it, then someone could harvest it to use it as a bogus sender address or use it to spam you.

And if that isn't enough, there are also bot programs out that pick a domain and generate every possible address on that domain, then flip between those addresses both for spam and for forging the sender address.

Because some geeks just don't have enough to do with their days...