Have you ever received a strange e-mail... from yourself?
 

Just checking my e-mails, and got a new one. It said something about Microsoft, and had no attachment, but- here's the wierd part- it was from myself. I'm running a virus scan now, and just updated the profiles. If it is a trojan, I hope I catch it now.

There have been various viruses/worms that do this, and also it's a trick that spammers like to use. It's easy to forge a header.

Yes Keith, and you can bet that other people are receiving the spam with your email forged as the 'from' address. I had a rash of emails coming into my box that were bouncebacks from accounts that didn't exist on other domains. Since I didn't originate those emails, some spammer was doing what I mentioned above.

-gb-

A while back I started getting ones from my old email address, you know my email address but my old IP. I kept deleteing them for months. Then I remembered asking if the old provider could forward my mail and them saying they did not think so.

Finally curiosity got the best of me and I opened one. BIG mistake! It was a virus. Strange one too, as the only damage it did was to disable and mess up my Norton Anti-Virus software. How strange huh?

If it's from you to you, don't open it.

mike

My girlfriend got into one of my accounts and thought it would be sweet to send a note to me. Freaked me out, until I realized it was her.

I used to get a ton of spam and virus emails from non-existing accounts from my domain. It was up to 100 a day at one point. Then it magically stopped.

Stupid kids and their hacking.

I just had to reinstall Windows on my wife's machine. It would seem she got an email from herself, and opened it. As if that wasn't bad enough, when it started acting up, she ran the antivirus and deleted all her system files.

The magic is the anti-spam filters that yours and other ISP's have begun using. But you'd be surprised to find that most spam isn't from kids. Yeah, they are hacking to write virus and trojan horse code, but a lot of spam email is simply scam artists trying to get your money using social engineering, or selling bogus merchandise.

-gb-

Keith, unfortunately all that has to be done in Outlook to spoof an e-mail identity is to change the name listing. It's the same with all e-mail setup because it only knows what you tell it to put in the field. Any of us could send you an e-mail right now that said your name and if using Outlook could also use your address in the from line and it can easily be made to reply back to you by simply placing your address in the reply to field, all of which is behind the scenes. So, if you replied you would send it to yourself again and get yet another message to yourself. That's how these f*****s keep from getting caught, they put someone else's address in the reply to field so you can't see their true origin. Hotmail offers that feature as well. You can change the reply address to anything you want for outgoing messages so when someone replies, it goes to the address you chose. Like Boyd said, the way to find the origin of the message, which isn't necessarily the true origin, is to look in the e-mail header for the origin IP by right clicking on the message and choose properties, then the details tab, finally click message source and maximize that window. The last listing in the received from list is the origin. However, that IP/mailserver could have been hijacked without the owner/ISP's knowledge so you will never be able to catch the little bastard!!

About 4 days after I got my new Dell, I got 27 viruses and at least 1 worm. The virus/firewall program is useless. Now I'm back to checking e-mail on my old computer with MS DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.11. (I have HTML turned off and all attachments can be easily deleted.)

The way that I found out was that I was uploading worms to a newsgroup. Of course everyone complained. Thanks, Dell! ;*)