Why am I getting Spam from myselfPreviously, I wrote an article on how to prevent spam, which led someone to ask "Why am I getting spam from myself?" Good question, with several possible answers.

 

Most of the time the spam that looks like it is coming from you really isn't. Spammers do their best to hide their true identity, which includes not only their real email address, but also from where the email is being sent from. What the spammer has done is called spoofing. The "From:" part of an email address is so easy to fake, or spoof. In order to trace the true identity of the spammer, one must look at the email's full header, which will also be full of other spoofing tricks so as to try to throw people off the spammer's true identiy. If this is the case with the spam that you are getting, there is nothing that you can do about it.

There is however another more disturbing possibility. That being that some form of malware has been installed on your computer, and is accessing your address book and actually sending spam from your own computer. Obviously, the best cure here is prevention in the first place, by keeping your computer updated with the latest updates as well as keeping your anti-virus up to date as well.

 Additionally, there is something you can do to easily monitor this. Just add email addresses to your address book that are clearly not valid emails. Here are a couple of example email addresses that could be used:

  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
In this case, the "O" in "a0l.com" is actually the number zero instead of the letter O.

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Again, the "O" in "c0mcast.com" is really the number zero instead of the letter O.

In setting up these email addresses in your address book, if you happen to get one of these rogue spamming programs on your computer, you will receive a bounce email stating that this is not a valid email address. This will alert you that you have been infected by one of these nasty programs on your computer.

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