Did you ever get an Email from YOURSELF?

Yes, I just got an Advertisement to make Millions in Real Estate sent to me and it was from me!

I looked up the IP address of the true sender and sent a complaint to the provider.

Has this happened to anyone else?

Bill

I think the closest thing like that that happened to me was losing an argument with myself

Ryan,

I do that all the time ...
It prepares me for losing to the other members of the Household if you know what I mean.


Bill

Reminds me of the song "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter".
Bill, I've sent a couple of emails to myself to try to figure out why you don't get the ones I send to you. I still don't understand...S

electure,

Were the ones you sent to me returned?
I can see two possibilities why I wouldn't have seen or gotten them (assuming you have my address correct .. )

One is if it doesn't have words in the subject field that make it stand out from the multitude of Spam I get it might be deleted. RE: ECN Forum or something Electrical in the subject field will catch my eye. I do look for emails with attachments before the Trash gets dumped too, but if an email has an embedded picture it might not be seen.

Another possibility is that you are on a server that was sending a lot of Virusses or spam at one time and it is blocked by our Mail Server.

To try and figure this out please send me something and tell me here in this thread that it was sent and when. I invite anyone else that wants to do the same thing.

Bill

I have gotten email from myslef, or so it appears. Once your e-mail address is on a spam list it is easy enough for the spammer to spoof the from address with any address s/he feels like.

geez, like talkin' to myself isn't bad enough......

Let's just hope it never gets so bad that you have to file a complaint or charges against yourself.


Roger

It's an old spammer technique. This way, those who use some of the less-sophisticated filters are sure to get the message--people generally don't (or don't want to) filter messages from themselves. (Because of test messages, etc...)

Also, domains are configured so that all mail is passed along. For example, "asdflkjsdlfkjsdflkj@electrical-contractor.net" will arrive in whatever mailbox is configured as the "catch-all."

Sometimes spammers use addresses like these to make filtering (based on address) more difficult.

I've been using a (FREE!) piece of software called SpamPal (http://www.spampal.org/) with decent results. It takes some configuring and takes some time for it to "learn" your e-mail trends, but it is a neat little program. (As far as I know, it's Windows-only.)

I get a lot of e-mails with 'esbchgu' as sender or in the subject line, as I have 'esbchgu' as user name at hotmail. To a human it's pretty obvious that it's just some random letters, not my name. A computer can't tell. Thus, I can simply delete anything that starts with 'Hi Esbchgu' or the like.

Yes, I get messages apparently from myself from time to time.

As has been mentioned above, the "problem" with the e-mail system is that the From field can be set to show anything the sender wants it to show. No checking is performed on that field anywhere along the way -- Each system that gets the message determines where to send it on to next but the from field is just passed along intact.

There are always the message headers to trace back, if you can be bothered.

For anyone who doesn't have the appropriate tools already on their system, here are a couple of useful sites for tracing domains, IP addresses, etc.
http://www.samspade.org/
http://www.geektools.com



[This message has been edited by pauluk (edited 10-07-2003).]

Nice references. . .Thanks, Paul.

Bill:
Now that you asked the question.....I see e-mail (junk) that comes from most of my e-mail address. Spam senders cahnge the "@xxxx" somehow I guess. I talk to myself enough, I don't have to write & then read it.

Used to be "junk mail", then "spam" and now it seems to be the FAX sales pitches. That's another thread.

John

Bill,
e-mail comin' at ya...S

Got it!!

Where's the Pole?