"A friend of mine got an e-mail from himself that was Spam. Can this really happen?"

People don’t usually send themselves Spam however some Spammers have been known to make it look that way. It can sometimes appear as if a friend is sending you Spam. Or it can appear that it is sent to yourself.

To mask where Spam is coming from, Spammers will sometimes pick an address (or a few addresses) from the list they are Spamming and use it in place of their own. So, for example, if you were on the Spam list you might get an e-mail from yourself. Or, if they had taken your address from their Spam list and used this as the sender address, you might get quite a few bounce back messages. (Bounce backs indicate e-mail sent to addresses that are not valid.)

These e-mails are forgeries since you did not really send them - someone simply used your address from a list. They are called spoofs if they forge the visible address and also the server origin.

"Ratware" (Spamming software) can take addresses from a list and randomly insert them as the sender address. This helps the Spammer because it means the bounce backs won’t all go to a single address (and there are usually loads of bounce backs). All of this benefits the Spammer since it helps avoid Spam detection on servers and home systems.

Our confusion is generally a result of disguised information in the e-mail header. For many of us, our e-mail programs only show us the following fields:

To:
From:
Cc:
Subject:

However, this header information can be disguised to hide the fact that an e-mail is Spam. And this is exactly what Spammers do. The result is that we often don’t see our own name or address in the “To” or “Cc” fields. They have been hidden.

Similarly, Spammers also disguise their own address in the “From” field. In some cases, we may even see our own name there. This is because the “From” field is forged. Spammers don’t want anyone replying to them and have therefore disguised their true address.

The important thing to keep in mind is not to trust everything you see. If you receive a Spam, the name or address you see in the “From” field is probably not the true one. Responding to Spam lets Spammers know that you’ve received their message, encouraging them to send you more.

• Be careful about whom you give out your e-mail address to

• Consider getting a second e-mail address to use for online sign- ups

• Use a second e-mail address for postings to newsgroups

• If you have a Web site with a contact link, use a second e-mail address or hide the address with code (like java)