Email from myself but not me?

i have just recieved a spam email from my email address but of course i didn't send it to myself anyone know how they did it have they got access to my email account?

Email from myself but not me?
ur system has been hijacked and ur machine is now essentially a bot.....u need to run some antvirus/spyware programs in safe mode if u have such run them if not i would dl


http://www.superantispyware.com/


http://www.free-av.com/
Reply:The "From" address in email is not verified in any way. You can often open up your email client's preferences and put any email address you like in there. Spammers often use the email address they are sending To: as the From: address because it's more likely to be on the whitelist of allowed addresses and not get filtered.





For some fun, you can send emails to people who aren't in the address list by using the Bcc field. Send the email to bob@example.com and put your friend's email address in the Bcc field. Your friend will receive an email addressed to Bob that somehow magically got delivered to them instead.
Reply:You have a virus -- your PC has been hijacked! Time to buy a really good anti-virus software!
Reply:No, they have found a server with little or no security, also found your address from somebodies virus infected machine and used your address as the from so it does not get blocked.
Reply:As suggested, machine has been compromised by a a trojan computer program. These types of programs look and act as programs that are useful to the user, but they have seperate functionality that serves the purposes of a malicious person.





In this case, your machine is being used to send out spam email messages. Your email was found on your computer system, so you received the spam. Its likely that other people on your contacts will receive the same message(s)





These sort of infections are spread by users who unknowingly or unwillingly download computer programs. This likely came from a rogue email attachment. In the future you should avoid attachments even from people you know.





To get rid of the current infection you should run a virus/malware scan. If you have any security software on your computer it has likely been compromised to ignore the infection thats there already. For this reason, its unwise to download any other security software(as advised above) because it will suffer the same fate as your current software.





In this case, you should run an online virus scan. Try http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ from Trend Micro. This is great way to check your system. Another one i recommend is http://support.f-secure.com/enu/home/ols... This scanner is unique in that it will search for rootkits that are embedded in your system. These are particularly sneaky infections that are sophisticated enough to hide themselves from the majority of scanners. A third recommendation is http://www.kaspersky.com/virusscanner Scanning with multiple scanners is a great way to make sure nothing is missed. Try two of these or maybe all 3. I have used HouseCall personally and I know that it will remove what it finds.





Good Luck.