my spam is being returned unsent

Over the last month or so I have started receiving returned email messages that my mail was undeliverable to the following addresses. Obviously a spammer somehow found my email account to spoof. Is it that easy to spoof some ones username without a corresponding IP address, or password? My password would not be an easy one to guess I and I am sure there are a lot easier targets out there than me. Has anyone else had this happen to them?

I get messages all the time from Yahoo saying that my message was undeliverable. They usually come back with a virus attached. But I don’t send these out (and I support the death penalty for those who do) so I don’t worry about it too much. What’s happened is that some spineless spammer somewhere has found your email address somehow and is putting it on the messages so that when they bounce, they don’t bounce back to the actual sender. Hopefully soon all the big players in the email world (Yahoo, MS, AOL) will come up with an email standard that isn’t so easy to spoof. Till then I would just delete the messages. They haven’t hacked your account in any way; they’ve just put your email address in the reply-to field.

“From” addresses by themselves are trivial to forge. I’ve had many supposed bounced e-mails that I most definitely did not send. As a corrolary to that, the fact that an e-mail appears to come from someone you know does not necessarily imply that it really did come from that person (somebody completely different could have had a worm that read their e-address book and used those addresses as “From” and/or “To” addresses). So, be careful about deciding that a good friend is a closet pervert! :smiley:

I’ve been getting the same kind of thing, also for about the past month. I figured they’re virus-laden and delete them all, since they all seem to have attachments. Another weird thing is that some of them mimic (but don’t actually reproduce, IIRC) the addresses of people I’ve emailed in the past. For example, the address i3eyl@address.com might show when I’ve emailed i3eiy@address.com before. Other times it’s obviously an unfamiliar account.

The Klez virus is infamous for doing this. Person A gets infected (Well, his computer does, anyway). The virus makes Outlook send to everyone in its address book copes of itself spoofing the return address at one of those addresses selected at random (Person B). Persons C, D, E, etc. get the virus and crab about it, or their ISP intercepts it and sends back to the sender of record a virus notification. The only connection between C and B is that they are both in A’s address book. If you happen to reconize the address the notification came from, it’s only because you and A have the same circle of friends.

DD

I’ve just started getting these too – bounce messages, all for spam with the subject line “Indispensable Software on cd . . . needy? seeBody”. About 20 of them since Wednesday. I wish there was a way to sue these clowns.

In addition, I haven’t gotten any personal (neither spam nor mailing list) email in months, and now I’m worrying that my address might have gotten on some ISPs’ blacklists.

The last time that happened to my account, I reported it to my email provider and they told me it was a worm going around the email servers, not something that was actually sent from my computer.

In addition, I haven’t gotten any personal (neither spam nor mailing list) email in months, and now I’m worrying that my address might have gotten on some ISPs’ blacklists.
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thats what I am worried about, or someone trying to sue me for sending links to kiddie porn sites, Oh wait the FBI is here now, phew… just the pizza guy.

It just sucks that it is so easy to make it look like it came from you, although in reality I guess there is no way to trace it back to you. This seems like a fairly new spammer technique

It’s not new at all. Fake emails have been around since pretty much the beginning of the internet. It takes absolutely no skill to spoof the “mail from” section of an email.