Why do I get e-mails I never sent or SPAM from myself?

Fairly often we receive reports from customers that they have received a “Message Undeliverable” from an e-mail that they never sent. Alternately, they may receive a SPAM e-mail that looks like it is from themselves. Naturally, they assume they must have a virus on their PC or their e-mail server has become infected or compromised. Most of the time, however, it’s neither.

It’s a problem with the nature of e-mail. There is no standard of sender authentication (yet). So, just as anyone could send you a letter and put any return address on it they wanted, anyone can send an e-mail and make it look like it came from anyone else (people of lesser morals can have a lot of fun with friends “spoofing” e-mail addresses). There are some methods of detecting this at the server level, but they are not foolproof and certainly not yet standardized.

Spammers will occasionally send you e-mail from yourself or someone else with your same domain name (or so it appears) in hopes that it will make it past SPAM filters. They do this in an attempt to get you to actually look at the e-mail and send them your checking account information or purchase whatever Chinese pharmaceuticals they are pushing that week.

So, nothing’s really wrong, except a decades old insecure technology called e-mail and developed by “scientists” that never considered despicable spammers or the occasional practical joker.

If you want an example of how bad SPAM & Viruses are on the Internet, ThrottleNet (and we're not THAT big of a company) has stopped 121 MILLION SPAM e-mails and 125,000 viruses from reaching their destinations in about one year of SPAM/Virus filtering (Oct 2006 to Oct 2007). Consider it takes 2.5 seconds to identify & delete a SPAM e-mail, and our little service has saved humanity 3,501 days of productivity.

Fortunately for us, Edison didn’t have e-mail….