Hope is perplexed and feels violated by some of the emails she received
For several months I have been receiving very undesirable emails
which mostly list male prescription drugs in the subject line, and many
of them show that they are sent "From" me "To" me. Some of this type
mail comes in with other Senders names, but right-clicking on Properties
and Details reveal that they have used my email address as the Sender.
Clicking on Message Source at the bottom of the Detail box shows
"Return-Path: < (my address).com >
"Received: from mailhost.cac.......etc.......(may be forged)"
I've tried blocking the messages, but discovered that I had blocked
myself from sending test messages or copies of emails to myself, which I
sometimes do just to see how it will appear to the recipients. I have
set up Message Rules to block mail which contains certain words in the
subject line, but many of these emails still manage to get by that.
I never open the emails, but it is very annoying and time-consuming to
have to delete the ones that slip by my Spam Filter. I feel that it is a
form of identity theft and am offended by it. How is it possible for
someone to send mail using another person's email address, and is there
any way to stop it?
Our Answer
Your question is a good one. And there is no simple answer. Trying
to unravel the complexities of email protocols and forged headers in a
few short paragraphs isn't possible.
As you've learned - the hard way - blocking "sender" when the sender is,
apparently, you, is only going to cause you frustration. It makes no
sense anyway to "block sender' with spam emails because professional
spammers send from thousands of different email addresses. You'd be
constantly blocking senders while the spam poured in.
Message rules are a better way of handling those kinds of emails, but
still spammers know about message rules and will vary the subject line
slightly with each subsequent mailing. One of the favorite
rule-defeating tricks is to use a number in the subject line, like an
invoice number and randomly change the digits. That simple trick defeats
many simple message rules - and it's just one of the many games that
spammers use to get around spam filters and message rules.
But don't confuse identity theft with spam mails that appear to come
from your own email address. There are many possible ways this can
happen, including entering your email address on sites that don't handle
stored email addresses securely, posting your email address on a forum
post or message board, etc. The number one way this happens though is,
someone you know has your email address in their address book and
they've become infected with Trojan that scans their computer for email
addresses to use in the "From" and "To" fields of automatically (and
furtively) generated mass mailings. Trojans that infect computers can
also make that computer a "zombie" or part of network of infected
computers that someone controls from a remote location. By issuing a
command from a remote location a miscreant can order all the infected
computers - or zombies - in a botnet to send millions of emails with a
variety of subject lines, attachments, or containing links to phishing
sites. These emails are sent silently - the owner of the zombie computer
has no idea his or her computer is sending thousands and thousands of
emails with various forged "From " addresses. In some cases the From and
To addresses will be the same, as in your case. Each email these
infected computers - or zombies - send out will be the same - each will
have the same From and To address. So thousands of emails will be sent
from an infected computer like this:
From: helen444r@whatever.com
To: helen444r@whatever.com
From: michaelbisque23@yourdomain.com
To: michaelbisque23Wyourdomain.com
From: pennytmiller60@iamyourisp.com
To: pennytmilller60@imayourisp.com
And so on and so on - dozens, hundreds, or thousands of emails being
sent on demand by tens of thousands of infected computers - and you'll
never know exactly where they came from or who actually sent them. In
many cases it will be someone you know, someone whose computer has
become infected because they've not installed anti-virus - or they have
but never kept it up to date.
Spammers might be
scumbags but they're not stupid. Spammers are starting to figure out
clever ways to foil spam filters and blocked senders. By using the "To"
address as the "From" address they get around spam filters with ease. No
one is going to filter email from themselves. And if a user tries to use
"Block sender" they are going to be blocking themselves. Pretty clever
isn't it? Spammers are not stupid.
Don't confuse this with identity theft, your email address while
"personal information" isn't sensitive information. There are many
places where your email address might easily be stolen from.
There's no way to stop this unless you want to use some sort of
challenged-based email filtering system, and this is NOT
recommended. All you'd do, if you switched to this out-of-date spam
control system, is lose a lot of important emails. Challenged-base spam
filters have never worked and will never work.
The only suggestions we can make are these:
1. Get a new email address and use it judiciously
2. Get a second "throw-away" address to use on forums, message boards, etc.
3. Get a third email address for use for online ordering.
4. Turn off "Automatically put people I reply to in my Contacts List
(Address Book)"
If you do the above - and you start getting emails with your own email
address in the From and To fields - then you'll know someone you know and
you've exchanged emails with has your address in their address book and
they're also infected with a Trojan. Unless you have very few email
addresses in your address book, you'll probably never know which person
is the infected one.
Also, number 4 is important. By default, Windows Mail and Outlook
Express will put every person you reply to in your address book/contacts
lists. Making this the default setting was not a very wise idea by
Microsoft. It's done nothing but exacerbate the problem. Make sure you
click "Tools/Options/Send" and uncheck the box next to "Automatically
put people I reply to in my Contacts List (Address Book)".
We hope this helps you understand the complexity of the problem we all
face.
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