My gmail is receiving spam email from what appears to be my very own gmail address. How can that be, unless the other account isn't really a gmail account?
i used to get "message rejected" emails (advertising [censored] enlargements, etc) from people i did not know and the returned message had my email address as sender. weird.
the spam being pushed out simply spoofs the "from" address of the email to match the "to" address. Most people don't have their own email address blocked with their SPAM filter settings or anything. It also attracts a lot of people to open it.
Nothing to be worried about, it is highly unlikely that someone hacked your gmail account and is now sending you emails from it. It is far more likely that someone has a bot net pushing this stuff out and simply spoofing the address as I mentioned.
Unfortunately, gmail doesn't display full headers. Or maybe I just don't know how to display them. I can see the long headers in my earthlink email.
EDIT: Never mind, long headers are available in gmail:
1. Log in to your Gmail account.
2. Open the message you'd like to view headers for.
3. Click the down arrow next to 'Reply,' at the top-right of the message pane.
4. Select 'Show Original.'
Originally Posted By: moribundman
So someone is simply spoofing my email address? Is that worth the effort? And what's the point?
They do it to get you to click on them and show a valid email address.
I use the free Thunderbird Email program and have made a simple message filter.
You can setup it so all email not in your email contacts address book goes to the Trash Folder, etc. After making sure that the folks I correspond with were properly entered and their mail did not end up in the Trash Folder, I changed it so if they were not in my Address Book to delete them.
Works great and I never see them!
Simple to setup. No additional software needed.
Only thing to remember if you are setting up more than one POP3 account is to remove the "Use Global Inbox (store mail in Local Folders)". This allows email to arrive in separate account in boxes.
With IMAP, this is not an issue.
Thunderbird versions are available for Windows, Linux, and MAC O/S.
Folks sending out Spam have used this method a long time and will continue doing it in the hopes that they can get by filters folks setup @ their ISP, etc.
Only way I have stopped not only this but other Spam too was setting up a Message Filter in Thunderbird.
Once setup, it stops all Spam emails or sends to a trash folder, etc.
I've found GMAIL to filter spam really effectively.
I use POP download to outlook. I've never had it so that spam got downloaded to outlook. if it ever did outlook could filter it. it kind of adds another layer of protection.
Using a conventional email program, it is very, very easy to put whatever you want in the "From:" field of an email.
Slightly off-topic: I had set up my email address to be a "catch-all" for my domain. I got *hundreds* (daily) of returned spam emails sent to others *from* [email protected]!
One of the first spam emails I ever received was "from" a Hotmail address. I returned the email to the "sender" with a very impolite note, only to realize that the poor owner of that Hotmail address knew nothing of the spam. Fudging the "From:" field is right outta paragraph 1 of page 1 of book 1 of Spamming For Dummies, methinks.