Like everyone when I check my mail I get the odd piece of spam e-mail, thankfully very few these days. So checking my mail this evening I end up with 271 mails. Aside from three, all were relating to spam, and all 268 of these within a two hour period this morning. However, non of them actually came from a spammer themselves. It would appear that whoever sent these out used a fake return address to one which I actually own. Therefore I got a lot of spam filter returned messages (in the process sending out junk mails themselves). Plus lots of out of office messages too. The French/German ones I can safely assume to be the same thing. Hope it has stopped now - but is there anything I can do to actually get back at the person who originally sent out the messages (i.e. such as finding out/reporting to their ISP)?
If you still have the original emails, you can find the originating IP (with a little work) and report that IP/time combo to his ISP. But it's probably some ISP in China that doesn't care. Bottom line, it probably won't do you any good. Most likely a waste of time.
I actually had this problem too about two weeks ago. My spam filter caught all of them, but I had no idea what they were. I quickly deleted all of them out of the spam folder and went on with my day. But then I was worried that maybe my computer was hijacked or something since all of them were basically kicked back emails from addresses that rejected them from when I sent them. Obviously, I never sent them. I rean all my virus check stuff and came up with nothing. So does this mean that people are or aren't getting spam emails from my address? And if so, how does one go about making that stop?
They are. You can't. It's not *actually* coming from you - the spammer is "spoofing" your address. It's trivially easy to do, unfortunately, because the email protocol wasn't designed with this problem in mind.
Okay, so my computer itself isn't at risk any more than it was before this happened, then, right? Like my computer hasn't been hacked or anything, has it?
Thankfully I only got two today. All of which Thunderbird now picked up on. And it's easy on a basic visible level to fake an e-mail address. That's how all mine are sent/received. The actually e-mail account/server is different to the address I actually use (and own).