Spam from my own account?

There are a couple different virus's that will do that. Here is a warning from Google blogspot:

You may have seen stories in the news recently about malware on Blogger, such has this one from the BBC or this one from Committee to Protect Bloggers. Blogger was not compromised. Instead, the blog posts are from bloggers whose machines were compromised by a Trojan horse. These bloggers had their mail2blogger email addresses in their computers' address books (a perfectly legitimate use case), so when the malicious software spammed every address in their address book with its content, a copy of that email was posted to their blog.

Thanks for the input Steve S.,

Unfortunately my account is just a yahoo account and I don't really do any blogging with it, so my thought is that it has nothing to do with blogging, but please correct me if I'm wrong. Thanks again.

JJ

Sleepware - yeah, my wife says I do that all the time, amongst other things...

Seriously, there is malware that will set itself up on your PC and allow a third party to use your email account to send spam. There is other code that will simply read your contacts directory and use that information to send spam.

You need to get a good antivirus package and a good firewall set up. Norton does a good job of this. PC World usually has an article as to which security package they prefer on their website.

Another thing is to not leave the PC running when you're not using it. I know it's enough time to get a cuppa waiting for the silly thing to boot, but in terms of security it's good protection.

I typically will just turn off my wireless internet when I leave the computer for a short time. Also, one might just unplug their internet cable if it is a wired connection. I'm pretty sure this will be equivalent to just shutting the pc down, but without the reboot time

I suspect you are right.

Thanks,

I access that account from work and home, AVG for one Norton for the other I'll run a scan on both and see what turns up.

Heard a vicious rumor you can't get a good garbage plate anymore, is this true?

JJSEEKER

There's nothing to stop someone from putting whatever they want into the sender ID fields.

Apparently this is also true with caller ID since I frequently get unwanted telemarketing calls that come in with my business phone number in the caller ID field.

From what I understand IP6 would make it more difficult for someone to obfuscate their ID since every address would be unique. It's not clear if or when they would turn off IP4 which would create a lot of issues with older systems.

I had the same problem with my yahoo account, turned out I had rented a server from another company and i used my email address on the new server mail account.

I just had to change the settings on the server.

Sleepmail it is called.

Late at night you get up and go to your computer, like a zombie, and you send out many e-mails, some to yourself as you make lots of typos with eyes closed.

Your PC has been infected by malware. Carry out a thorough anti-virus scan with the most updated viral signatures.

Some sendings get stuck when an entry in the address list is invalid.

Put an entry like AAAA in your address book with an invalid email address. This entry will be on top of the list . It will be the first entry to be checked by your mail software and found invalid which in turn will activate a request to you (pop up window) and hence the virus will not continue the sending. Of course you will be alerted before the spam is going out.

I know it works for some viruses