Sending spam from YOUR OWN email address

[matooa]

We've all gotten an email before from someone we know, that we can tell is obvious spam.

Well it finally happened the other week that one of my friends told me that I was the one doing this now. I was quite upset by it because it apparently sent this spam/virus email out to everyone I've ever sent an email to

I looked it a solution on another online forum and a lot of the responses people gave were to just change your password, and to a very difficult password at that if you can. I did this the other day and I hope it works.

Posting this to see if there are any other solutions out there to this problem, and also so you can see the first solution I am attempting to resolve the problem with so that you can use if this ever happens to your email. I will try to post back and let you know if it happens and again, meaning changing the password didn't work.

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[Gdkitty · Accepted solution]

I had the same thing happen to me.. about 3 weeks ago.  Only way i knew it had happened, was the bounce back failed messages, from ones it was trying to mail that didnt exist anymore.

Now, people can send spam mail out from you, roughly, 3 ways.

1) If you download all your email to your PC, using outlook express, outlook, or a similar program.  If you have a virus/malware, they can often grab your address book, and mass mail directly from there, using your mail info (or their own, just stealing your address book to add to their spam lists)

2) Someone has obtained your login/password combination.  This could have been from using that email to log into another website and use the same password, etc. and it was taken from there.. keyloged, etc.   From this, they could send spam directly by loging in as you into your mail.. or just even simply us it to connect to the servers from their own spam program on their own pcs.

3) Spoofed emails.  When setting up your email , you can very easily make it look like the emai is comming from ANYONE and the reply back goes there.. i could set up my rogers email to look like it came from you and replys could go back to you.  Just by having your email ANYWHERE out there, or on someone elese address book, has the potential of someone getting it and could use it this way (Though, they wont necessarily have your list of friends to email by this way)

Other than a whole new email address.. yes changing your password is the best bet overall.  Just make sure you do it from a CLEAN and SECURE machine.. if the place you change it from, has a keyloger stealing the password, can be as tough of a password as you want, wouldnt matter 😛

Good luck!

[Gdkitty · Accepted solution]

I had the same thing happen to me.. about 3 weeks ago.  Only way i knew it had happened, was the bounce back failed messages, from ones it was trying to mail that didnt exist anymore.

Now, people can send spam mail out from you, roughly, 3 ways.

1) If you download all your email to your PC, using outlook express, outlook, or a similar program.  If you have a virus/malware, they can often grab your address book, and mass mail directly from there, using your mail info (or their own, just stealing your address book to add to their spam lists)

2) Someone has obtained your login/password combination.  This could have been from using that email to log into another website and use the same password, etc. and it was taken from there.. keyloged, etc.   From this, they could send spam directly by loging in as you into your mail.. or just even simply us it to connect to the servers from their own spam program on their own pcs.

3) Spoofed emails.  When setting up your email , you can very easily make it look like the emai is comming from ANYONE and the reply back goes there.. i could set up my rogers email to look like it came from you and replys could go back to you.  Just by having your email ANYWHERE out there, or on someone elese address book, has the potential of someone getting it and could use it this way (Though, they wont necessarily have your list of friends to email by this way)

Other than a whole new email address.. yes changing your password is the best bet overall.  Just make sure you do it from a CLEAN and SECURE machine.. if the place you change it from, has a keyloger stealing the password, can be as tough of a password as you want, wouldnt matter 😛

Good luck!

[Pauly]

most likely your email password was compromised, theyre getting sneaky too now these spammers, they go through your address book and send emails addressed to your friends name, i get a few the other day looked so legit, but my cousins in mexico no internet so i knew it was fake

[timv]

I have been seeing this as well. I have a full featured virus program that says my machine is clean.

Is there software that can find this?

I've gone through the email header info and used IP address software to find out the address is in Syria, but I don't know what I can do to unlink that IP address from my user email address.

I have changed my password, but I would think that if they were logging on as me, whatever they send should be in my sent messages folder, no?

[Gdkitty]

Again, as stated in the above post by myself.

There is NO tie between your address and that IP address.

Email addresses, as in what is actually displayed, is the EASIEST thing to manipulate, and pretty much any free email software can do it.
I could set up my email with rogers.. to have YOUR email listed.. and then 'appears' to come from you.

This can often be done, in some business, etc.. where you want ALL incoming to come through a specific address.. all replies, etc.. but is really being dealt with by a seperate different address itself.


I would say a good 80% of the time, the emails are NOT coming from your own account.
From an email virus, etc.   That they are just using your email address for spoofing purposes.