For the past 3 days I have been getting emails with odd little titles like “Your private life is compromised” and various lewd comments, and when I open them all that is there is an advert for Viagra and other related crap. Like I’ve got enough of a sex life to even need it! 
If I try to reply to the email, it just ends up being delivered to me! 
How can I determine where this junk mail is actually originating from?
They are using forged headers with your own address as the “from” address. There is no useful origination point, since it was most likely sent by a botnet.
Do not try to communicate with spammers.
Does this mean my pc has been compromised in some way then, friedo?
As it stands, the only thing it is doing, is giving me the inconvenience of having to delete them each day. Why is it inadvisable responding to them? They obviously already have my address.
I’ve just had another one with the following message included;
Is that any help to anyone? Is there any danger in me clicking on the “Unsubscribe” section?
Yes. You’re then moved from probable email address to confirmed email address and will be more widely distributed and aggressively spammed.
Just delete and move on. Never respond to one.
Yes! Don’t do it! Never click on links in spam. There’s a strong possibility that you’ll confirm your address to some spammer.
It is unlikely - but possible - that your PC has been compromised. More likely is that your email address has been harvested from somewhere or they’re taking a scattershot approach and doing things like randomfirstname.randomlastname@yourdomain
I am surprised you have never encountered spam like this before. It’s been around for a decade or more.
Should my broadband provider have some sort of “Mark As Spam” function I can use to deal with this? Or would I need additional software for that sort of thing?
So, the swines have finally got round to my pc, have they? 
Would it be impossible to determine where this crap came from, or just not worth the time and/or effort?
Yes, whatever provider you use for email should include a spam folder and a way to mark email as spam, also any email client such as Outlook or Thunderbird also has this feature. I recommend Gmail, its spam filters are spot on–in three years I’ve only had four or five spam emails end up in my inbox and I just mark them as spam and they’ll never be seen again.
Don’t read spam, don’t open spam, don’t click on any links in spam, just don’t do it! You only encourage the fuckers if you do, and it’s a primo vector to get adware, spyware and viruses onto your computer.
ETA: Spam, spam, spam, spam, spammety spam, wonderful spam!
There seems to be a rush of this type of spam on at the moment - I’ve been getting seven or eight a day since Friday. Just delete it all.
The only ones I bother to report are the ones pretending to be from my bank. The bank have an email address to send them on to but I have no idea if they do anything about it.
Can’t say it loud enough - NEVER click on the link!
I’ve not clicked on the ad located in the email, or any other part within it, but I have clicked on the “reply” part of my mailbox, which was how I found out they were coming from myself…allegedly! Was that a bad move then? :smack:
What I don’t understand is why when they have a product they are selling the FTC or other law enforcement agencies can’t just fine the hell out of the company advertising.
because the companies claim ignorance and there is almost no way to trace the spambots back to said companies.
I would get a program like Adaware or something similar to scan your HD and make sure you’re not infected. After that, use spam filters, spam filters, and more spam filtes. I’m also a Gmail guy and I almost never get spam anymore. I dunno if you can just sign up for gmail these days but I still have invites from years ago if you’d like one, plus you can have your mail forwarded from your old account to your gmail so if your mom or something sends a mail to the old account you’ll still get it. If you want it just PM me, but I’d think you can just sign up straight out, no invites needed, for a gmail account
Yup, I totally agree. Why can’t they be hit with a $10 fine say, for every email that is reported to a specific group charged with reigning in the use of this annoying, but seemingly futile tactic? It’s really beyond my comprehension how the perpetrators expect this practice to have any positive results! :mad:
Ahh, they don’t expect a positive result, they get it. Someone is making money for there to be so much spam out there. The cost of sending all that spam is somehow worth the reward of a one-in-a-million person clicking on the ads and buying the product.
They found a way around my gmail filter, they’re using google groups. I’d just filter the group, unfortunately they’re moderately smart and it’s usually a different group, and doesn’t seem to follow any pattern so I’m stuck. Oh well.
I read a piece in the newspaper this morning about a study that was done at the University of California (BBC News link). Sending out “fake spam”, the researchers only got 28 “hits” out of 350 million emails sent – but that would still have been enough to earn them over $100 a day.
Unfortunately, it appears they did not perform the vital follow-up research of tracking down the 28 morons who responded and setting about them with a clue-by-four.
I use Trend Micro Internet Security and Spam Butcher to catch the would be infiltrators of my email and computer. My spammers list is longer than my wifes hair, and that is pretty long. But, I catch 99% of the spam with those programs working for me.
I’ve been getting a rash of junk the last few days as “Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender”, which turns out to be spam with my address in forged “From” headers being bounced by my ISP. The mail is actually coming from a random bunch of addresses, presumably spambots. The ISP’s server attaches an error like:
.
And the servers at a number of other sites bounce it back to the forged From address (which is a forwarder back to my ISP account). If it doesn’t stop happening, I may ask my ISP about it. After the first few, the ISP’s spam canner started canning the “Undeliverable” notices anyway.