Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Last night I received an email with the subject Hot Photos of Michelle Obama and the sender was my email address. Obviously I didn't send myself spam.
Another of my email accounts also received a piece of spam with its sender being itself (different subject and I don't recall now what it was).
Our other four email accounts received no spam sent from themselves nor from the other two above-mentioned accounts.
Curious how this happened. If my address book had been hacked, then all the email accounts should have received spam (all my address books list all of our accounts). Plus my address books each have a bogus address that would bounce back with a mailer daemon, so the spam didn't originate from my machine.
If some website was hacked and email addresses taken and used, that would be odd because I use my different email accounts for different things and no two would be found together anywhere.
Any thoughts? Outside of satisfying my curiosity, do I need to be concerned?
Panda scan - do a scan of every computer you have to see if there is a virus. Usually it's a sign of a virus/trojan or it could just be coincidence. Spammers do this.
It usually means somebody else has an infection on their computer that sends out junk to somebody listed in the address book, inbox or send items folder. It's usually not on your computer.
If you ever have had those annoying forwarded emails from "friends" where they have been clueless on how to hide the recipient name, you can almost guarantee that they also have an unprotected system. They get infected, your name is in their address book, and you get an email from yourself.
There's no check built into the specification for validating the sender address of an email. I could send you an e-mail that appears to come from the President, or Donald Trump, or PayPal. When you setup your account in your mail client, it asks you what your email address is. You can put anything in there and as long as it looks like an e-mail address, that's what'll show up as the "sender" in emails you send.
In other words, it's just a forged sender address, just like every other spam generated. In this case, they're just setting the sender and recipient addresses to be the same in an attempt to bypass poorly implemented spam filtering software. Nothing was hacked.
Thanks for the panda link Roselvr - ran the scan and nothing found - also rescanned with AVG and Adaware and nothing. So, I guess I can relax that there's no issue inside my computer and that indeed the bogus spam was generated elsewhere by one of methods you've all described.
I was fearful that my address book had been somehow compromised and I would have to spend hours upon hours sending apologies to all my contacts for crap emails presumably sent by me. Phew that I don't have to do that!
I get these, and a while back absent-mindedly clicked to send everything from that Sender to the Junk file...
I generate a fair amount of auto-email from the MLS that copies my address automatically, that I file away in clients' files for when they ask about properties. All moved to Junk...
Thanks for the panda link Roselvr - ran the scan and nothing found - also rescanned with AVG and Adaware and nothing. So, I guess I can relax that there's no issue inside my computer and that indeed the bogus spam was generated elsewhere by one of methods you've all described.
I was fearful that my address book had been somehow compromised and I would have to spend hours upon hours sending apologies to all my contacts for crap emails presumably sent by me. Phew that I don't have to do that!
Certainly. If anyone ever has a concern that they may have a virus, then a scan never hurts anything.
My advice when people ask about an email from their own account: I explain that someone else has an infection, they can delete it and quit trying to figure it out. You'll never know how it happened since it happened on somebody else's computer.
Last edited by mensaguy; 11-10-2008 at 06:47 AM..
Reason: punctuation
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Update
You'll never know how it happened since it happened on somebody else's computer.
