How do they send spam emails to my busines account that appear to come from my same business account?

Question

Example: my business email for instance is [e-mail], and some days I receive spam email from [e-mail], and it is spelled exactly the same, and if I email it back to it, I will receive an email from myself. How do they do it?

Answer 1

Just as you can specify how your own name looks on outgoing mail... that is one way they may be fooling you into thinking the email is coming from your own email address.



Also, just as you can choose a different reply-to address, so can they, which is probably why when you hit reply it will attempt to send to your own email address.



The best thing to do is to make sure your email client is displaying FULL HEADERS and learn how to read them.

For instance, if you look at the [x-originating IP] that should be the real IP address the mail is coming from (unless they have spoofed this, which is very hard to do)...



Once you have the [X-Originating IP] I suggest you copy and paste that IP into a program or website like SamSpade (www.samspade.ORG) ... do a "Whois" search and you will then see the domain information for that IP (this will usually include address, phone, email for technical and administrative contacts as well as where to report abuse).



The domain info you get through the "whois" will usually have an [e-mail] to report abuse, if not you can try sending to one of the other listed contacts. ***This might be your culprit...



I would suggest you then forward these emails to [e-mail], as well as to the abuse@ of their ISP.



You can also look for other IPs in the email headers as the email may go thru other ISPs that you can report the abuse to... this also might reveal the actual email address of the culprit.



Good luck.

Answer 2

When a program sends an email it specifies all the details. So anybody could send an email from [e-mail] because there is no way to make it so that only bill can send them.



As someone has mentioned, you can check the headers of the email to see where the email was sent from, but there is no way of guaranteeing it was sent by the person it appears to be (other than asking them).



It's the same way websites (such as eBay) can send emails to other members from your address when you filled out a form on their page.

Answer 3

That is done by creating a STMP server on a computer, setting the hostname to yahoo.com and faking the email headers. It's pretty easy to do once you realize how emails work. It is not necessarily a virus. I do this all the time. I send myself emails from my linux box, every time it updates itself.

Answer 4

You've got a virus or spyware of some sort...

run a virus scan and spyware scan..

But to fix the annoying emails, until you get rid of the spyware/virus,

Add the e-mail: "[e-mail]" or something like that, that starts with an a.. add that to your address book. Nobody will have that email, so it's invalid, and the email won't send!



I hope it works, good luck!