what the heck! just saw an email with this header in my gmail mail box: Viagra Best Deals (or similar) from: to: what the hell?
I guess it is phishing emails with the spammers using your email address address as the reply to email address, very common nowadays, the spammers would stoop to anything.
yep i get it all the time with my company mail, at one point i thought they were realying through one of my servers but nope just simply using my mail address as the reply how nice!
I normally double check the headers just in case my computer caught viruses or trojan, but till now all such cases are all phishing emails from spammers.
i get them all the time and i spend hours and hours sending mail back as soon as i send i get a email its a vicious circle
I once had to close an email account because someone used my email as a reply address to send thousands of spam messages, I got about 15,000 no recipient emails good times. I sent an email to all my friends from god once though so it has it's uses. None of them did what god suggested and gave me money, but oh well.
It's not hard to alter the headers and spoof email addresses. I took a PHP class a few years ago and that was one of our lessons.
Yeah I see emails like this quite often - the bad thing is that others get those same emails and think they are from you
I had a site many moons ago which allowed people to send spoof emails. It made the national paper here in the UK, brought down the server of the hosting company and got me into all sorts of trouble. I got threatened with a lawsuit for £250,000, complaint from a MP (UK equivalent of a senator) and didn't make a penny out of it. I managed to get out alive though and got some work out of it though so not all bad. A bit of a childish and naieve site looking back though and I was lucky to not lose out for the sake of classroom bragging rights on hits.
Of course the important lesson is that generally the 'from' email address is about as trustworthy as the return address on a regular envelope. Very few people realise this and it should be more widely known. I've recently discovered a similar issue with SMS.
Yeah. It results in identity theft and one has to be very careful while dealing with this kind of phishing attacks
cherrs guys, thanks for replys, guess there is nothing i can do for now, and if you get a Viagra Promo mail sent from me... oh well, just trash it.
There is no real way, it's just like writing a return address on an envelope - you can put what you like. However I wouldn't worry about it too much. Spam filters usually work on the senders IP addresses/content and it's unlikely that you'll be peanalised as a result. The biggest problem you'll find is that if they use your address as the return address in a massive mailing, you can then get a deluge of out of office replies and bounced mails to you. This doesn't seem so common now, presumably becuase they try and vary the emails to fool spam filters.