Spam been sent from my own account to my own account???

dulpit

Hey, my boss is using Microsoft Outlook 2003, received an email the other day from himself (apparently). The title of email was Spring Savings (or something) and the body of the email was 1 big image (which outlook blocked)

Funny thing is that the sender's email was the exact same as the receiver's (i.e. the "to" email address and "from" are the same) so it looks to my boss like somebody is sending dodgy crap from his account...

Is this possible? Or is it a case of some baddies blocking their own email address & replacing it with my bosses? As far as i can see the email was only sent to the 1 address...

Any help/advice/tips much appreciated... (plus i'll get brownie points from boss )

tbh

yeah basically when sending email, the sending server will have a field that says
mail from:<address> and that address can be anything at all. Although servers CAN verify that this is an actual address, most don't bother because of the overhead. Spammers use this to generate fake "from" address to get around blocks and filters. They use the addresses they have harvested as recipients to generate the from addresses. You'll see sometimes that you'll get a non-delivery report for a spam mail that looks like it was sent from you, when actually it wasn't, just your address was used. It looks like spammers might be setting the to: and from: to the same field as this will probably fool a few filters (cause no-one will block mail sent from their own address).

ActorSeeksJob

nm tbh sounds right ^^

stevejazzx

well it's poosible that someone could also be controlling your bosses mail account...in which case you should change access codes immediately.
the other explanation is that the sending account is similiarly titled account i.e
bob@bob.ie
[EMAIL="bob@.bob.ie"]bob@.bob.ie[/EMAIL]
or that your bosses email address is the senders users name and it just looks the senders email when it not its just his user name(most likley scenario)
if your boss is really sending junk mail to himself he should be able to see this in sent items unless someone else entirely is using the account when he's not there and tidying up all the evidence afterwards...it's also possible but unlikley that someone is unsing the account remotely i.e via the internet but your boss would see this activity....change password to his account and it'll stop.

tbh

stevejazzx wrote:

...change password to his account and it'll stop.

it'll stop only if someone was actually sending mail from his account - imho, not very likely.

SeanW

Yeah, the spam is most likely using forged headers.