How to Stop False Emails from my Own Email?

[Leah Ireland]

Hi, I'm sure everyone has encountered this - lots of fake emails to one's email address that say they come from your own email address?

Hope I've explained that clearly, thanks! I would love to be rid of the problem.

[guest040412]

Learn this material or befriend a computer geek who can help you remove malware:

http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=35407

[JDNorthface]

Originally Posted by Leah Ireland

Hi, I'm sure everyone has encountered this - lots of fake emails to one's email address that say they come from your own email address?

Hope I've explained that clearly, thanks! I would love to be rid of the problem.

This is (most likely) just a common, garden variety virus, or worm. It is, as the poster above mentioned, referred to as malware. That is short for malicious software. Most are harmless but highly annoying and need to be removed.

[Mokoa]

If your email is web based (Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Google Mail, etc) you will have to contact their respective support types to help you. I had it happen to my Hotmail account a while back and they were able to fix things quite quickly.

This thread about keeping your computer clean will also be of interest you...

http://www.eccie.net/showthread.php?t=170070

[ck1942]

Often times the real sender of the email is not what appears in the "sent from" address. Using your email client's "view headers" option you can see the actual sender's address.

What you also can do, fwiw, is set up your email client user options to direct any mail that shows you as the sender to land that mail in your spam folder. This is not a great idea if, for example, you often include yourself as a "CC" or "BCC" in mail that you send to other folks.

Quite often you can set your options to land certain types of mail (subject or body contains "viagra" or words) to always go to the spam folder.

Hope that helps!

[rdog]

If they are masking their email address using your address they can do it without malware, but you can find out as mentioned in a previous reply on how to see where it came from, not sure you can stop it, you can make it so that you won't see a incoming email using your addy, but it won't stop other people from getting email showing your address as the sender