Pace

I was horrified to find in my spam box together with all the other rubbish my E mail being used by various people trying to sell things.
How can I put a stop to this?

Pace

Tarq57

Do you use (and refer to here) an e-mail program such as Outlook Express, or a web browser based account, such as Hotmail/Yahoo mail etc?
What type of security do you use on your PC, and how long since you scanned with it/them?

Avtrician

You will probably find that your email address has been found somewhere, and copied (spoofed) and used as a sending address. In this case no-one is actually using your account, just your address.

Your address could have been taken from a friends address book if they have/had a virus, or from a site you have registered on.

The only thing you can do is set up a filter to dump returned to sender emails. They will go away after a while, dont even try to say sorry to the senders, they will probly have your address blocked.

StaceyF

Email address harvesting is big business.

Never reply to them, it merely confirms that the spammer has hit a "live" address. You then find yourself on mailing lists. Lots and lots.

I use MailWasher to bounce emails back; it appears to the sender that your email address doesn't exist.

Shunter

I'd bet a month's wages that any spam you receive is either a) not sent from a valid address, making bouncing pointless, or b) sent from a valid address, the owner of which has no idea their address is being maliciously stamped in the from: field.

Hence these days, replying ain't going to make the slightest difference.

Spam exists because of the fundamentally flawed email architecture. It was designed a long time ago in much more trusting times.

Best thing you can do these days is invest £10/yr in a Spamcop subscription. I get around 300 bits of spam per day, but they all get filtered. About once a month I might see one which has slipped through the net and landed in my inbox, but I've never seen a false positive occur resulting in a legit email going into the spam box.

Gertrude the Wombat

Sounds like you're a joe-job victim.

There is nothing you can do about it.

The bounces will stop coming after a couple of days, as the spammers move on to spoofing someone else's address.

There is really absolutely nothing at all whatsoever that you can do about it.

corsair

I had a similar problem. Somehow they got hold of my address book in Yahoo mail and a Chinese site sent a mail to everyone offering electrical goods supposedly sent on by me. I think it must have been a Trojan or something as it seemed to disappear when Spybot and Adaware was run. But irritating none the less.

On the other hand, on by product was that I'm back in contact with an old friend whose address I had thought defunct. So silver lining there.

jimtherev

I’m not totally sure that I understand your problem. If it’s just lotsa spam from people kindly offering to improve certain physical characteristics of yours, or $30m from a frozen account in Nigeria, then, fine, we all get those. I agree with the above posts.

But if other people are receiving spam allegedly from your email address – that could be serious, as (just maybe) they have not only your email addy but your password as well. ***in that case change your password, like, NOW***. This means that you will need to adjust your mailbox settings and probably the password settings of your router/modem, otherwise you will have disconnected yourself, which ain’t the object of the exercise. But better safe, huh?

Besterluck,
Jim.

kenhughes

Read Gertrude's post (two before yours).

It's a common tactic of spammers to use someone else's email address in a (mostly futile) bid to beat spam-blockers and Black-lists.

They aren't posting from the victim's mailbox, or even from the victim's mail server - they're just using the email address in the From: field.

It's highly-unlikely that passwords have been stolen. The emails probably originate from the Asia-Pacific region and the nearest they have been to the victim's mail server is when they get bounced by sysops who don't know how to handle spoofed emails.

As said above, press delete and move on, you can't stop them, you can only ignore them.

mixture

jimtherev,

You've got a lot to learn about the ways of the internet......

This :
Is fairly useless advice assuming it's just yet another case of impersonation (although you should be changing your password on a regular basis anyway).

You don't need anyone's password to send emails that appear to come from their email address. Anyone could, for example, send a few million spam emails that appear to come from "danny@pprune" ....the only thing you'll know about it is when you see the bouncebacks from email addresses that don't work. In order to obtain responses, the spammers use a combination of "reply-to", phone numbers and websites ....hence they never need access to the original impersonated account.

acebaxter

This is fun. I just found out my entire address book had been sent junk mail. Yes, it was sent from my account because they were all in MY sent mail folder.

The best part is my address book was also deleted from my yahoo account.

Yes, I changed the password. Why would anyone take the time to delete my address book? Kids!