Okay, so I open my Hotmail account, and I’ve got a message from johncorrado@msn.com. As I do have an account with MSN, I’m wondering whether I accidentally e-mailed myself something.
Open it up, and lo and behold- spam! Someone trying to sell me insurance. Except that it’s claiming to be from an account that I actually hold.
The next day, I get another spam, this one for homeloans, from… johncorrado@yahoo.com!
What the hell?
Do companies assume that I’ll accept spam from myself?
Do they think I’ll actually delude myself into thinking that I both have these accounts and wrote these e-mails to myself? Or do they think that I’ll automatically buy something from someone who has the same name as me? Or do they just attach a random name and location to their spam, and I got lucky enough to have my name attached to two of them?
And how the heck do they send me e-mail from an account they most distinctly do not have?
I’m not sure about hotmail, but other e-mail programs, such as Outlook, allow you to display whatever you want as your “from name”. If you look at the message properties, though, it’ll give you their real address. If Hotmail has a properties function, you can find out who it’s really from.
They think it’ll be more likely that you’ll open it.
Not unless they’re complete idiots. They figure that something like 0.0001% of people who open it will be stupid enough to actually try out the offer, so if they can double or triple the number of people who look at it, by hook or by crook, they’ll make more money.
No. Unless they’re complete idiots. Which isn’t beyond the realm of reason.
Spammers are constantly trying to think of new ways to get you to look at their offers. My guess is that at some time in the past, you sent mail from your msn account to your hotmail account, or vice-versa. Then, they had a packet sniffer that saw the message, so they figured that mail between those two accounts wouldn’t automatically be filtered out.
As to how they got your name in the From line, well, welcome to the world of the Simple Mail Transport Protocol.
Not that it helps you out in any way, John, but the same thing happens to me all the time. Problem is, sometimes I do send things to myself from one e-mail to another so I always open the damn things!