Lets see if any of this sounds familiar:
“So I check my e-mail and I get 5 messages saying that MY message to the following addresses were not deliverable:
bill@email.co.uk
william@email.co.uk
shawn@email.de
frank@messenger.comThe problem is, I never sent e-mail to any of those people. Included in the undeliverable messages was the message I supposedly sent. It was an advertisement for prescription pills. Um…. I don’t sell prescription pills”
If this sounds familiar, then your e-mail address has been used to send out SPAM or junk e-mail. Next logical question is how did this happen? Good question! That’s what this article is all about.
The best way to describe what happened is to look at a real-mail situation:
- You create a letter to send. You put in an envelope.
- You address it to your friend in Arizona.
- You put the WRONG return address in the left corner. Instead, you put the address of some stranger in another city.
- If the letter was not deliverable to your friend in Arizona, where would the letter be returned?
The answer to number 4 is: It would be sent to the return address that you wrote on the outside of the letter. So in this case, to the stranger in some other city. The above example is to show how this whole system works. Just like you can fake the return address on a real letter, email messages can be sent out with someone else’s name on them. So, if the email message is undeliverable it goes to whatever “return address” was included in the message.
That is basically what happened. Someone put your e-mail address as the return address on a large number of messages they sent out. There is no way to prevent this. Just in the same way, you couldn’t stop someone from putting your home address as the return address on a letter they wrote.
#1 by Sheila Dutton on January 16, 2009 - 8:29 am
How do they log in with someone else’s address? Don’t they need my password to get it to dome up? If they show another password, wouldn’t it be rejected as already selected? I don’t see how they can show my address as the sender. Doesn’t the computer automatically print the address they are logged in with to show who sent it? What they have done with me is send ugly to messages to my own address from myself, so it looks. I wonder how many other people receive these awful titles and wonder if I sent them. I only e-mail a very few friends and family. I would be heart-sick if they thought I was sending suggestive messages. Is there no way to identify them? Please answer if possible.
#2 by Aaron on February 11, 2009 - 5:02 pm
Sheila Dutton asked:
“How do they log in with someone else’s address?”
Shelia, whoever sends the message doesn’t log in with the address of someone else.
Think of email like the U.S. Postal Service. If you decided to send a letter to John Doe, you could easily forge the return address on your envelope, claiming the letter was from Jane Doe when in fact it was from you.
Email is much the same way. It is extremely easy to forge a return address on an electronic envelope. Likewise it is as easy to forge a “Sincerely, Jane Doe” in a U.S.P.S. letter as it is to forge the “From:” header in an email message.
This is why InfoWest, as well as banks and other organizations strongly urge people to NOT reply to email messages and include personal information (like account numbers, passwords, birth dates, etc.)–you could be replying to a forged message.
And this is also why you might sometimes see those pesky error messages claiming “your message to johndoe@example.org was not delivered” when you never sent such a message. Someone else sent a message and used your email address as the forged envelope return address, and/or the message “From” address.
-Aaron
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