How did I get an email from myself?

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Hey, I received an email from myself today. How is that possible? It smelled fishy so I junked it IMMEDIATELY. I wanted to know how someone can use my account to send emails?
Melinda

Melinda, great going. Most recipients would have been too perplexed to act quickly… like you did. The email was not just “fishy” but could have been a phishing scam or (more likely) carried a virus or a worm. Coincidently, the next day of receiving your message I too got an email myself and below is a screenshot of what landed in my inbox.

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Email from myself: Is anyone using my email account to send these emails?

The email I got from ‘myself’ wasn’t harmful – if it did had a virus or a worm, I’m sure the Norton anti-virus program running on my computer would have deleted it. The message was just spam with an ‘enticing’ offer of an available position paying a few hundred dollars per day. I suppose there are two reasons as to why spammers (or phishers) send emails that appear to come from the recipient. Firstly, the message would definitely catch the eye and, secondly, it would escape the automated junk e-mail filter of the email client being used.

How can you get an email from yourself?

It’s actually not difficult at all and a simple perl program, for instance, will enable you to send an email that appears to come from any email account! Want to play God? You can send email from god@heaven.com! All that is required by an emailing script is the email addresses of the sender and the recipient, the email subject (optional) and the actual contents of the message (optional). Here is how to create a simple email function using Perl.

Has someone got hold of you email account?

Probably no! I suppose the email was generated by a simple program like the Perl script I mentioned above. I doubt someone has got hold of your account as long as you have been careful with the login details.
How to stop such emails? The easiest is to use a proper junk email or spam filter and not rely on the inbuilt one in the email client, especially Windows Live Mail or Windows Mail Vista.

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