Since a couple of weeks, I have regularly been getting spam e-mails from my own accounts. This is happening for gmail as well as my ISP’s e-mail a/c. These spam e-mails are also being sent to all my contacts in gmail/tbird. I have changed the gmail passwords and security question, but it has not stopped. If I view the entire header, it seems to have been sent from some other domain. This is very irritating and embarrassing.
How can this happen? I am quite sure my PC is not infected - (a) I have avast! and (b) run Malwarebytes Anti-Malware periodically. Both give me no errors on scanning. Both inbound/outbound e-mail scanners are working. I also use Sygate Personal Firewall and everything is locked down (except for avast! webshield and mail scanner, which I have to allow once every day). Sygate’s traffic log also does not indicate anything out of the usual.
I too, in the past, have seen spam emails either reporting to me spam from one of my email addresses or, like you, getting spam emails apparently coming from one of my email addresses.
In both these cases the email address was one that I created on my main ISP but had never used to send or receive email. This had to suggest to me that in our ISPs there are some less than honest employees who are happy to sell the email addresses to which they have access. Even without this there are other ways for dishonest persons to harvest email addresses and create the kind of spam you are seeing through no fault or lapse in security on your part.
Unfortunately once the email address has been obtained you may well receive all kinds of undesired emails (and I am sure I do not need to elaborate). We can all keep changing our email addresses but that gets to be tiresome … or for now we can look into the help provided by spam inhibiting services.
I personally use a free product called spamihilator … I am not endorsing it (but it works well for me) and there are a number of other products (free and paid for) out there that I am sure other forum members might advise.
I use Outlook mail filter and use GMail antispam features.
Indeed, just very few spam pass through.
I’ve used Spamihilator in the past. Very good tool.
It is very easy for a spam program to use the address of the recipient as the from address. That does not mean that you generated the email. Submit the email to Spamcot.net and you will see that they ignore the from address as it can be spoofed easily. This is usually done by invading a mail server etc.
An example of this are the fake rejected bounce-back emails. The Outlook filter and Windows Mail/Windows Live Mail filters are pretty good. I no longer have need of Mailwasher since I switched to Outlook.
Thanks guys (n gals, if any) for your replies. I have no problem with the spam side of it. Gmail anyway marks it as spam and so can I with T’bird if I wish. The big problem is it is being sent to some of my contacts. How could this happen? Is my Gmail a/c hacked? and sent from my Gmail a/c? But if so, then there is nothing in the ‘Sent Mail’. I have changed the passwords on all my accounts. In one account it seems to have stopped, but for the other account it is continuing.
If I check the full headers, the received from domain/IP is obviously not of my ISP/Gmail but some completely unknown domain names, e.g. absincorp.com or bb.netvision.il.
Spoofing a senders address has always been easy. If people you know are getting these messages, most likely the email address list of someone known to all of you has been obtained somehow. It could be as simple as someone “finding” a bulk email with a list of CC addresses at the top.
Eventually, they will probably move on to another spoofed address. In the meantime there’s nothing you can do about it.
As I stated earlier, spoofing is so common that I totally ignore the problem. I, too, have a Gmail address. I never use it to send email other than to forward to my other account. It is only used for Google applications log-ins and to receive reports from Google. Yet the junk mail filter still picks up an average of 40 mails a day. Spambots are being used. They are a fact of life. I wish it were not true.
Yes, I think this seems to be probably it. Because only one or two fellows on this list complained. I have since asked several of my other contacts, but no one has reported any spam e-mails purporting to be from me. Possibly someone else also the recipient of the e-mail could have been infected and list of e-mail addresses obtained from his/her PC.
I cannot change my e-mail addy’s because of this. If there is nothing I can do… well I will simply apologise and explain the situation.