How did this email get to me?

[Nathan Forrest]

Today I received two email messages in my Hotmail from my sister in law. One was Titled "Georgia Arms" The other "The Candyman Says it all" I opened the first and it said Something like "The most terrible thing you ever saw, See below" I knew she wouldn't have sent it so I deleted them both with out opening the second one. Ran virus scan and called her. She verified she didn't send them. OK well how is it that the sender name looked exactly like normal messages I occasionally get from her? She has an apple computer and says she has their anti virus software on it.

[tork'd]

it's one(of the many) reasons we dumped hotmail

[Fishslayer]

Your SIL needs to change her Hotmail password...

[Strato]

The zombie bots hack into the email account and send their ads and stuff to the whole contact list. I've recieved these from many email contacts no matter the email provider. Even some with their own email servers.

[Bob R]

I keep myself (the hotmail account) as a contact so that if something like that happens to me I know right away. A while back I received spam from myself, knowing I didn't send it. So I went in and sent out a real email and then changed my password to a much stronger password. So far, so good.

bob

[Texas Star]

I, too, have gotten what looks just like e-mail from acquaintances. Just last week, I got one, quickly followed by a real e-mail saying that the person in question was changing her e-mail password. She apologized for the false e-mail.

I think some of these people got hacked on Facebook. They are all there. But "their" e-mail reached me via Hotmail. It's really from some outfit trying to sell discount electronics.

[LVSteve]

It is likely that the spammer messed with the email headers to appear that your SIL sent it, but the actual source may be quite different. Until you compare the headers between that dodgy email and a real one from your SIL, you cannot tell if it a clone job or her account has actually been compromised.

[LouisianaJoe]

Let me explain how this works. When you send a normal email, It gets sent to your Service provider email server or web based server such as Hotmail. The server sends to the recipient's email server and that sends it to you.

A spammer has their own email server and can send an email from a valid address to another valid address without using the sending address's server.

Several years ago I wrote an email server to send emails from a software program. The program was a Case Tracking system that I wrote for an appellate court. When a Judge signed an order, a copy was emailed to all attorneys assigned to the case. The sending email address was the main email of the court. My point here is that valid emails can be sent in this manner.

When you get newsletters that your subscribe to, they use their own email server to send emails to a list of subscribers.

Now the dark side:

If you send emails or forward emails without deleting all of the email addresses in them, sooner or later a recipient with a Trojan program installed will harvest all of the addresses and send to their server where they send spam from you or one of your friends to everyone else in the list that they harvested.

You can not stop all of the spammers, but you can quit sending new email addresses by doing the following:

If you forward an email, delete all of the junk including email addresses up to the good stuff that you want to send.

Then use BCC which means Blind Carbon Copy as the method of sending any emails. When you mark an email to be sent to, do not click to, click bcc. When you do this, everyone receiving your email will not see the addresses of yours or the emails that you send to.

If you do not know how to send BCC, select help in your email program to see how it is done.

Google "bcc hotmail" and you will see how to do this in hotmail.

Or just google "bcc"

[Fishslayer]

Back in the day I was a regular at the Monster.com jobhunting chatroom. I received a couple of those mass emails with just about every "regular" member's email included. Most contained a full real name and with bits & pieces picked up here & there you could find out a lot.

I had a little fun with that...

[labworm]

It's amazing what info people provide in those chain letter emails that circulate. Talk about gathering a list of email addresses.
People get sucked in, the topic fits their likings, the brain stops functioning and the info is circulated.

[joeintexas]

Yeah, I get the same stuff too, if I want a fake Rolex or a better sex life or a mail order bride I don't have to look past my inbox!

[blujax01]

The same thing happened to my MSN account a few years ago. Through that account, they hacked my EBay account.

I changed passwords, only to find them changed back the next day. I contacted MSN (hahahahaha) with no joy. My family and friends were getting "I'm stranded in France" emails with instructions to wire funds, etc., as well as false bids on EBay. I finally wised up, quit MSN and went elsewhere.
It was a terrible mess. I had to call everyone I knew to let them know the junk wasn't coming from me and give them my new email addy. I had to change on line bill pay, contact info for forums, in short, my virtual life became a virtual P.O.S.

So Louisiana Joe - when are you going to develop the "boomerang" software that will destroy the hacker's equipment when they pull these stunts? I'll be first in line to buy some!

[LouisianaJoe]

Originally Posted by blujax01

So Louisiana Joe - when are you going to develop the "boomerang" software that will destroy the hacker's equipment when they pull these stunts? I'll be first in line to buy some!

The problem is that there are legitimate uses of the sending technique. If you are subscribed to a newsletter, this is how it is sent.

That is why I clean my emails and use BCC.

Keep your Anti-Malware software up to date to stop most Trojan Programs. You can not stop them all because it takes some time for the Anti-Malware software to be updated when a new one hits the internet.