These e-mails could have something to do with newsletters or free offers you signed up for. But even if you don’t give your e-mail address out to any commercial enterprise, anyone you’ve sent e-mail to has your e-mail address in their address book. Then when they get infected with a virus, it can harvest the addresses out of their address book.
Once your e-mail address is known to spammers, there’s no way to stop the incoming mail. It can be filtered, but that’s up to the people that are in charge of your e-mail account.
I’d suggest you change e-mail address, a Gmail (Google mail) account is really good at keeping spam out. I’ve been using them for a year or more and rarely get more than a couple spams per week.
I’ve been getting these emails as well, with forged “From:” headers of my email address. I have a Mac. It’s not some local crime-net server hijack on my machine sending them; some botnet has gotten the the address I got from my ISP (Rogers). (I give out an address that redirects to it, but Rogers webmail defaults to its own address when sending, and sometimes I forget to change it.)
DO NOT click on the link in the spam email. I hovered over it so that the linked address would show up in the status bar at the bottom of my mail application, and the actual address wasn’t even close to being an MSN address.
Yeah, deception is a really great way to inspire trust in your potential customers. Jerk spammers.
And turn off automatic image loading!
Every HTML email you get with images should load without them and give you a chance to request download. This is to defeat ‘web bugs’.
What’s a web bug? Spammers can put a tiny pixel-sized image with a unique name in each email; when you open the email and auto-download any images, the spammer’s server matches the unique name of the image that was just requested with the email address it was sent to, and knows that that’s a live email address that will command a greater price when sold to other spammers.