Why am I getting spam from myself?
Hi everyone.
Leo Notenboom here for askleo.com. Here's the question that I got.
It's an example of a much larger problem.
I got email from someone at some domain.com with
in angle brackets, where someone at some domain.com is someone I don't know,
but myemail@outlook.com is in fact my email address.
It was as if I was getting spam from myself, but I did not send it.
How do I stop these emails from coming into my inbox?
How do I stop them from being sent?
It's usually for drugs or financial
services that I don't need or would never be interested in.
How can they use my own email? I can't block them.
As it says, it's illegal to block my own email.
I'll start with the bad news.
There is almost nothing you can do.
This is spam, pure and simple.
And abusing your email address
in the frontline is one of the ways that spammers try to bypass spam filters,
get your attention, get you to open the email, and so forth.
It's one of many tools they use to get their crap into our inboxes.
The remedy is actually pure and simple, unfortunately not 100% effective.
Mark it as spam from spoofing is what we're talking about here.
As it turns out, the from field in an email message is almost meaningless.
There's nothing that says it needs to be
a certain thing, it probably needs to look like an email address at some point,
but it doesn't have to be a valid email address.
It doesn't have to be the email address of the person sending the message.
It doesn't have to be an email address that isn't yours.
I mean, it could be literally anything,
which means it's trivial for spammers to set it to whatever they want to set it
to, and it has nothing to do with where the email actually came from.
That spam you got that looks like it came from you, it did not come from you.
It came from some random spammer out
on the internet, probably in another country.
As a result, there's nothing you can do.
Looking at the from address tells you nothing.
Blocking the from address will do nothing
because spammers are routinely just picking lots and lots of random
from addresses to make things look like they're coming from lots and lots
of different people, lots and lots of different places,
and as a result, basically making blocking completely pointless.
Yes, it's possible to sometimes look
at the headers you don't normally see in email to find the IP address
of the email service that the message was sent from.
That usually tells you that yes, it was in another country or somewhere
completely unrelated to the actual from field.
But the bottom line is that it's almost
impossible to truly trace where email came from.
So there's nothing you can do.
Now I want to be clear about something because a lot of people tend to get
a little concerned that, oh my gosh, they must have access to my email account
in order to send email that looks like it came from me.
They don't.
No one needs to access your account
in order to make an email message look like it came from you.
It really is that insecure.
It really is that easy.
And spammers do it constantly without having hacked your account.
They don't need access.
They could just make it look it came from you.
And like I said, there's no effective way to stop them.
Now, why do they do this?
Why are you getting email from yourself that looks like it came from yourself?
Why are you getting spam that looks like it came from you?
Well, there's two things.
One is they're not trying to spam you.
You just got lucky.
What they do is they end up using the lists of email addresses that they
send spam to to randomly populate the from field and all that spam.
So you apparently just got a message that happened to randomly contain your own
email address because, yeah, you're getting spam, nothing to do.
The other one is that they're trying
to spam someone else a different email address.
But that email bounced.
And because it was your email address in the from, that bounce got sent to you.
Again, you had nothing to do with it.
Your account had nothing to do with it.
It's just that the spammer happened
to choose your email address to put into the from field,
and when that email eventually bounced, the bounce went back to you.
Same thing, nothing to do.
Just ignore it and move on.
Again, there is nothing you can do about from spoofing.
It happens.
The thing you can do,
the only thing really is when you get spam in your inbox,
mark it as spam that'll move it to the junk folder or the spam folder or
the whatever folder your email client happens to use.
Ideally, this will train the spam filter
to do a better job of saying spam looks like this, that's spam.
Not all email filters,
not all spam filters do a good job of responding to us telling it this is spam.
But the really good ones do, and they do improve over time.
And part of that is relying on you marking as spam as spam.
If it's going into your inbox, mark it as spam.
If spam is automatically showing up
in your spam folder, that's the system working the way it's supposed to.
There's nothing to be done about that because that's the correct behavior.
There's no way to stop the message.
There's no way to stop spam.
The only thing you can really do is to get the system to train the system so
that when spam arrives, it automatically goes into your junk or spam folder.
Now, there is one thing that it's worth watching for.
I said earlier that your account has not
been hacked 99, 99% of the time that is absolutely true.
But for that tiny little fragment of cases where someone's account does get hacked
and the hacker actually uses the account to send spam,
for one thing, if you can still log in, again, chances are you've not been hacked
because spammers typically, or hackers typically will change your
password so that you can't log into your own account.
That's like the first sign that it's been hacked.
But if you can log into your account, then there's a small chance
that the hacker has decided to leave the password alone so as to delay how
quickly you determine that something is going on.
The thing to do is to check your sent mail
folder, see if there's outgoing email in there that you didn't send.
If there isn't, then again,
it's probably not your account that's involved, it's simply plain from spoofing.
I hope that helps clarify a little bit about what's going on.
When you get email that looks like spam
from yourself, it is not your account, it's just the way spammers spam.
And the thing to do is to market as spam and move on with your life.
For updates, for comments, for related links and more, visit askleo.com/3131.
I'm Leo Notenboom and this is Askleo.com. Thanks for watching.