What happens if a spammer made it look like you had sent all this spam out to everyone in your address book?

Ella: What happens if a spammer made it look like you had sent all this spam out to everyone in your address book?
What happens if a spammer made it look like you had sent all this spam out to everyone in your address book, but you had nothing to do with the spam?

I had since reported what was happening to my ISP, but, now I am worried that any email I send out to people in my address book will be blocked because of what had happened.

Thank you for your responses! 🙂

Answers and Views:

Answer by Der Freak
That´s a hard situation.
But the spammer can`t make his e-mail exactly like yours, so the persons should discovered that it isn`t your real account.
Apologize yourself by your contacts for the spam.

Greetings The Freak

Answer by bharathi
Two different methods of spamming; one is to simply replace someones email address in the SMTP ‘from’ field, the other (where people’s address book is spammed) usually results from a virus, easily obtained from the net via Microsofts Virus Import Utility, sorry, Outlook, and propogated by the unwary and unprotected.

When the spammers send an email they can specify anyone as the sender (this is a failing in the SMTP mechanism to send emails on the internet). They have generated a random email address which just happens to be yours.

When the receiver decides that the email is spam it sends a reply back to the sender to say that the delivery failed.

Just because an e-mail says it comes from Fred Bloggs does not mean Fred had any hand in sending it. Nor that it ever saw Fred’s outbox.

It is very easy to spoof the “From” field in an e-mail so you can never be 100% certain that any mail you receive is from the person it says it is. So even though “you” sent the mail it does not necessarily mean that your mail account or PC has been hacked.

It is just as possible that someone else who has your address in their contacts list was the source. They could have a malicious program lurking unseen on their PC sending out spam mails. Some of these nasties randomly select an e-mail address from the infected PC’s address book to try and disguise where the true origin was. Of course any recipient just sees it as coming from your account so you get the replies.

But as always, never a bad idea to double check your machine has not been compromised and run a full virus and spyware check just to be safe.