Spoofing problem

[JohnRoss]

Both I and a nearby friend have been receiving what I gather is called self sending spam which is a form of spoofing. What happens is that you receive an email which appears to have come from yourself. In both cases they appear to have come from a Canadian drug company pushing stuff like viagra. Whilst the contents of such emails might be offensive to some folk what really concerns me is the fact that spoofing has been used. If my email address can be spoofed to me it could be used to send such emails to other people.

I gather spoofing is illegal in many countries and I have reported the matter to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) via their website set up for that purpose. Has anybody else received similar emails here in France and what did you do about it? I suspect that someone has got hold of an email contacts list that contains both my and my friends email addresses. Yes I could change our email address but not convinced from what I have read that would solve the problem plus the problems changing the address would cause.........JR  

[Baz]

Whilst this will not solve your problem, I would strongly recommend that you immediately change your email password if you are worried that your email addresses may be used.

Baz

[Quillan]

The important bit is the header, you need to be able to see that or as sometimes also called the source depending what email software you use to view it. In there will be the real address from which it was sent. You then send a copy of the text and header to the ISP that holds the account. The email address to send it to is normally (90% of the time) abuse@xxxxx where the latter is the ISP like for instance [email protected] . The thing is though is normally these email address's are disposable, use once ones. It's not the company that's sending you emails normally but a third party which is how the company gets out of being prosecuted, a touch of "not me mate it was the other fella and I didn't authorise them to do it".

[JohnRoss]

Yes and thanks I have expanded the header information by clicking on Details at the top of my AOL email and the return path gives, I assume, the email address of whoever sent it. The email address was through Bellsouth which would seem to be an ISP taken over by AT&T so I have sent details to their abuse site. Mind you they only sent an automatic response and like the phishing one set up by the City of London police that is all you get. I always FWD emails from scammers that have some indication that they might have come from the UK, telephone numbers and addresses, to the UK site but I don't know if it helps them or if any action results from this. These people really are a pain and most of our received scam type emails come from Nigeria these days, about two a day. Most scam and spam emails get picked up by AOL and put in our spam box but not all. Trouble is that you have to look in the spam box and at the contents before deleting as genuine communications find their way there quite frequently too. Notifications from Total France get put there for example! This spoofing episode is something new for us however and let us hope that it does not continue!.......JR

PS Thanks to Baz but I don't think changing the password would help from what I have read about this.

[NormanH]

I may have posted before on how I had this a few years back. They sent mails apparently from me, some of which went to people in my address book.

As they concerned things which some people could find offensive (advertising breast implants I think) and these went to some elderly French ladies in an association of which I was a member it put me in an awkward situation, especially as the people concerned didn't have a lot of technical understanding so it was hard to try to convince them of how this had happened.