How do people send spam using my e-mai address?

Answer 1

Those spammers use software that makes the 'From' address the same as the 'To' email address, automatically, for all of the tens of thousands of emails they send out daily. That's common. A lot of spammers spoof (fake) the "From" address to make it appear as if it's from your own email address. It really isn't from your address though, as you can verify if you read the information in the email headers. You won't find it in your 'Sent' folder either. Presumably, they think you'll be more likely to open it out of curiosity if it looks as if it's 'from' your own address. Delete it without opening it, unless you've recently sent yourself email from that same address, which isn't necessary at all. If you must send yourself email reminders or whatever, use 2 or more email addresses and send yourself emails from one to the other. Solution: Filter out emails from your own email address. The specific way to set up such a filter depends on which email client or webmail service you use. There are too many email clients and webmail services to give specific filtering instructions for here. However, it's not hard to figure out how to do that. Helpful Ideas: A.) For my webmail accounts I set a filtering rule like: If 'From' = 'me@myaddress.com', Then Send to 'Trash'. B.) For my POP email accounts I use the free "Email Remover" program to delete all spam directly from the server, before opening my email client program. But my email client isn't set to check automatically for new emails. C.) Use 'Postini' or a similar service to filter out emails 'from' your own email address, as well as to filter out almost all other spam.