I doubt it. Some spam subjects are completely innocuous “Hi there” or “Last Saturday” - couple that with it being from a known sender, and there’s no way to tell it’s spam, without examining the content.
What if the email is “From” someone you know, it arrives in your mailbox, but according to Hotmail, isn’t even addressed to you? (the rest is the same, obvious spam email that didn’t directly come from the person I know)
Change it to “it’s enough in most cases to look at the subject”, and titles like “Hi there” sound very suspicious to me.
Some folks get troubled about the fact that it’s so easy to fake a return address in e-mail, to which I point out that it’s exactly as easy to fake a return address on ordinary USPS mail. Just like there’s nothing stopping ftg from filling in “obama@whitehouse.gov” in the “from” field of his e-mails, there’s nothing stopping me from writing “1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Washington, DC” on the corner of my envelopes.
I’ve gotten two of these spoofed emails from people with no connection to one another. In both cases, the subject line was empty. That’s always a warning sign, although I’ve seen some legitimate ones come through that way.
I remember when I was first getting on the net, and I used lynx for my web browser. When you clicked on a mailto link, it would let you set whatever you wanted in the From line. It was not a dedicated mail client, and since you couldn’t use it to check emails, there was no way to authenticate you.
Nowadays I believe there are SMTP servers that only allow you to use your actual email address. But those that don’t can still have your email address on them, despite the fact that they did not originate from your SMTP server.
Fair enough - I guess it depends on the kinds of subject lines your genuine acquantances are in the habit of using.
I’ve noticed the following pattern
people who say “my computer is probably virus and malware free” - Their computer is probably virus and malware free
people who say “There are no viruses on my computer/my antivirus says my computer is clean” - Installed Norton antivirus three years ago and have never updated it, they believe their computer is supposed to take 20 minutes to boot up, and obscure three quarters of their browser screen with task bars and pop up ads
Anyone who actually knows about computers is paranoid about that one bug they may have missed 
Note that there are perfectly good reasons for wanting to spoof the “From” line. I’ve always been annoyed at mail clients that don’t allow you control of it. Thunderbird allows you to set up multiple “identities” which you can select from when composing a message. I very nearly always send mail with a spoofed From, in that it is not the server I’m mailing from. The reason for doing this is not at all sinister - I use my own domain as the “public” address I hand out, forwarded to my actual ISP, so that I can swap my actual mail address around underneath it without having to change emails I’ve told people. At various points, my “published” address has been routed to corporate accounts, and so on. I want the public forwarder / domain, not whatever server I happen to be using showing up in the “From” line. Otherwise, people reply directly to the ISP I don’t want published, put it in their address books, etc.
There’s also the matter of being able to switch between personal and professional identities when replying. I despise having multiple active email accounts, and when forced to have, say, an employer email as well as my home ISP, I always set up forwarding to funnel everything into one place. Which means that I want control of the identity I’m using to reply.
For that matter, I WISH you could spoof caller ID easily from your cell phone without jumping through a lot of hoops. I don’t want people calling my cell phone directly, and don’t hand out my cell phone number (I don’t even have the damned thing memorized, actually). I want them calling my VOIP number, which is forwarded to my cell if I don’t answer. It screws things up any time I make a call from my cell by showing them the cell phone number.
There are several websites that allow you to send a spoofed email “for entertainment puposes only”. I will look it up in a bit. My boss gave me a big speech once upon a time how email was totally safe and the last thing he would question would be an email from his boss. 30 min later he recieved spoofed emails from:
his boss stating he was fired and to give drachillix his keys and alarm codes…
Another email from the regional hr manager with cc: to the rest of the regional management team to direct any operational questions to drachillix.
An email from his daughter saying she was marrying drachillix.
I just wanted to say that I <heart> this thread title.
Now people are getting fake emails from me.
Can someone explain to me more clearly how it can be that whatever/whoever is doing this apparently has my yahoo contacts list without in some way hacking my actualy yahoo account?
Above, someone suggested that it’s due to some recipient of a previous widecast email of mine having somehow let that address list out to the wide world. But as far as I can remember, I have never widecast any emails, ever.
Some Yahoo accounts may have been compromised, as have some Hotmail ac
counts. Happened to me recently with a defunct Hotmail account I used to have. I deleted the contacts in that account and changed the password.
Take a look in your Sent items folder to see if the emails are there. If so, change the password.
Si
It could also be from someone you know who knows a lot of the same people as you. Is there a pattern in the people getting e-mails “from you”? If they’re all family members, it might be a family member’s computer that got compromised. If they’re all from co-workers, it might be a co-worker, etc.
Ed Zotti recently had a similar problem.
Recipients include family, work acquaintances, old friends I haven’t talked to since high school, and video game publishers corresponding to various games I own…
I had looked earlier and the emails weren’t in the sent folder, so I’d assumed things were okay on that front.
But checking again, I now notice that for some reason nothing is in there since 2008, except two (and only two) messages that I did legitimately send today.
In other words, it’s not as if I switched off “save to send” in 2008–because it did save two messages I sent today.
But then, where did all the sent messages from 2008 to the present go?
I’m changing my password to be safe…
When my account was hacked, they cleared the sent mail folder. And, yes, they missed any over two years old.