Or is it merely some sort of trick used to lure you into carelessly opening the message?
thanks
-rainy
Oh now that’s wierd, I just emailed myself a note to remember to do something later (which I do frequently) and (which I’m guessing is the behavior this spam is trying to capitalize on) and my Outlook labeled it as SPAM. Of ocurse all I filled out was the subject line, no message body, perhaps that is part of the criteria the SPAM filter is looking for.
It’s quite normal; it’s probably not so much intended to trick you as to trick your spam filtering system. A tactic which was apparently successful in this case: by marking such messages as spam, you have trained Outlook to flag your own note-to-self messages as spam as well, which means that you now have little choice but to put your own address on the whitelist, which means that future spam using the same trick will get through with impunity.
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Anyone can put anything as the “From” address. So a spammer can easily do this.
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As mentioned, it can help get by some filters. You are unlikely to block yourself. emailing yourself is indeed quite useful. I last did it about a month ago. If you CC a lot, you might include yourself too.
Yeah, thunderbird can wind up labelling your own messages as spam or an email scam, too. When they’re in your “sent” or “drafts” folder even, which makes it seem like the mailer is accusing you of being a spammer. It’s a minor issue, but they should probably suppress the spam / email scam warnings when displaying those folders. I noticed this when I sent a message containing a link with an IP address rather than a domain, which causes thunderbird’s scam detector to flag it (stupid rule, but the warning’s not terribly intrusive and I haven’t bothered turning it off).
Not at all. It’s perfectly normal and healthy. There are times in every person’s life when, for some reason or other, no e-mail is coming in from others, not even spam. In that case it’s totally normal to self-spam. The rumors that this will cause hardware degradation or “hairy mouse” are entirely false.
I remember a virus or worm that would get into your address book and copy and spoof the email addresses so it would look like someone you know is sending you email when in actuality you may be infected.
Better spam filters (such as CRM-114) look at the bodies of messages, not just the headers, and so wouldn’t be stopped by such a simple ruse.
The most likely scenario is some friend of yours has been hijacked. His/her address book contains your email address. So that machine spams everybody its zombiemaster tells it to while using an address harvested from that machine’s address book as the from address. And your address was the lucky winner.
If you want to remind yourself about something, how about sending the message to a non-existent address and getting it returned? 
You can’t rely on getting a bounce message. Many email systems have turned that feature off, because of spam. (You don’t want to receive bounce messages for email you didn’t sent anyway just because a spammer is using your address.)
I often e-mail myself stuff (usually when I want to use Yahoo as off-site backup for one of my manuscripts, or to send myself a reminder), and it usually gets put in junk mail. You’d think Yahoo would be smart enough to know that if I’m sending myself an e-mail, it’s not spam. I guess I need to enter myself in my address book so Yahoo will know I’m one of my contacts. :rolleyes:
Bravo!
Oh yeah, and thanks for the serious replies as well 
-rainy
Not necessarily. It’s quite possible that email address was found by some net crawler (if it was published somewhere on the web - work emails listed at those “contact” pages are among worst offenders). Or it could be sold by some shady forum or other service demanding email address to confirm registration. Or maybe it was newsletter… There are dozens of ways to get your email address compromised to spambots.