spammer stole my email address!

[johnsmolowe]

i have for several days now been receiving bounced emails, stating unknown addressee or something similar. the text of the bounced email is spam, and the sender of the email (not the reply-to-address, the sender!) is listed as "jeff" or "demetrius" or some other first name followed by <my email address> i infer that someone is sending out bulk emails from my email address.

i don't care about the bounced messages. i am used to spam, i am happy that some of these masquerading emails don't get through. but i am alarmed that an unknown but maybe large number of individuals are receiving spam that purports to come from me!

i am using mail under osx.4.7 on a g5 dual 1.8 with 3.5 gb ram. my isp is att and my mail server is attyahoo. when i contact attyahoo, they say it's not their problem, no one ever hacks into their servers (i know this to be untrue), and it must be a virus. they don't care that macs don't get viruses and that my mac has been checked for viruses. they say maybe someone is using my address book (they don't care that it's not my friends who are getting the spam from my address, it's other random folk) and has my password. how can someone get my email password? it's not like i give my email password when i buy a book on amazon. could there be spyware on my mac?

the same thing happened a year ago. changing my password didn't help. yahoo was uninterested in helping. i eventually changed my email address

i'd like to research this problem, but i don't even know the name of this sort of attack. it's not exactly spam, as i am seeming to send spam, i am not receiving it. does anyone know the name of this type of attack? does anyone know a remedy short of closing this email account?

[camgangrel21]

What has gone on here is not that the spamer is useing your computer or you email server. What is going on is this. When a spamer finds a working email address at in this case yahoo, they fake there email send from header so that when someone gets this Spam it say it's from your email address.
I had this happen once on a gmail acount that I have. I let the Gmail team know about it. From what I was told they got people that where emailing me back to make me stop sending spam mail to them. To send the Spam to them at Gmail. They found out the IP gateway that the email was comeing from and did something so that that IP could not be used with Gmail.
I hope that helps you out.
As for what it's called it's know as "Spofing".

[johnsmolowe]

thanks, cam. well at least now i know the name of the attack. now if only attyahoo were as helpful as gmail.

[fryke]

Erh... *ANY*one can use your E-Mail address as sender address. Try it: Tell Mail.app you are "Bill Gates" <billg@microsoft.com> and send yourself an E-Mail. You'll get it. So? There's nothing you can really do. Just adjust your filters accordingly.