Title says it. Once or twice in the week before last, half a dozen daily this past week.
Email with obvious spam titles for budget Rx prices, boner pills. Always the same two titles, and always the same sender: me.
(To: TreacherousCretin@roadrunner
From: TreacherousCretin@roadrunner)
The Googleweb gives me confusing and alarming advice. I know my way around a computer pretty well, I can get under the hood for easy tinkering, but the whole realm of email and domains and such is Greek to me.
I always have AV and IS software running. Last night I made sure it was updated, then ran full scans on everything. Results were negative. Did the same with Malwarebytes Antimalware, also negative results.
Contacted Roadrunner TS, who advised changing my EM account password to something very strong. (It already was a maximum strength password, but I went ahead and changed it. Apparently didn’t make any difference.) Haven’t gotten back to them yet to see if that was the extent of their assistance.
Win7
Thunderbird for email
G Data Internet Security 2013 running 24/7
Firefox (I NEVER use Internet Explorer)
Can someone explain to me what’s going on? If I’m not infected I can just delete the offending messages, but still…
Look at the full headers of the spam email.
If the “Return Path” is your email address, but the “Received From” chain does not originate with your ISP, then someone is just spoofing your email address, and your account is (presumably) OK.
There’s not much you can do to stop these types of emails, though.
It doesn’t necessarily indicate that you’re infected. Faking the sender address of an e-mail is trivial, and making it identical to the recipient address is no harder. From the spammer’s perspective, it hast the advantage that your spam filter might let it through more easily, especially if you are in the habit of sending mails to yourself so that your self-learning filter (if you use one) will have been trained to treat such messages as ‘ham’.
If you’re sure you’re not infected and you have a strong password, my guess is that some spam service is simply using your email when they send their spam. It’s trivial to spoof the header of an email, so all they have to do is set the right metadata to the right field and BOOM, email from you. I’d honestly be more concerned about getting email from one of your friends. If you’re getting spoofed email from your own address, well, no harm, they obviously had your address anyway if they’re sending you email. If you’re getting it from your contacts, well, that implies they have access to your contacts which is a much bigger cause for alarm.
So, in short, sorry, you’ll probably have to live with it.
The From address of an email can be anything. It doesn’t have to be a real address or the address which sent the email. It’s just like a normal envelope where you can write anything as the return address. You can’t reply to a fake From address, but the spammer doesn’t care about that.
Not even that.
They are using your email address when they send spam to you.
When they send spam to Jragon, they use Jragon’s email address. Etc.
It’s just one more trick to try to get people to look at the spam email – having it appear to come from their own email address makes people more likely to open it.
If no one else is getting it in their inbox I wouldn’t worry about it. I have many email accounts but only use two, and still get these sometimes. Unless it is from Outlook or, (what does apple use? me. is what I saw but I am sure there are tons with the one that used a full apple system) it is probably just going to you and getting caught in spam filters for everyone else. It probably did go through to some and I would hope they would let you know that it did, I used to call the person when this happened at work and would also email the people I knew on the list saying it was spam, or
“Harmless but mildly irritating” is what I kind of figured, but a simple, straight answer was not to be found on the googleweb, and no answer at all from Roadrunner TS (who should know) other than the token “help” mentioned in my OP.
So, it looks like I’m stuck with the inconvenience of having to manually delete these things, but if I were me I’d say to myself: “B.F.D. There’s three seconds out of every day that I’ll never get back.”