Spam email sender addy same as mine?

It's called address spoofing, and is an old spammers trick. They do it ALL the time. (Hence how you can get spam from legitimate domains, like ebay.com)

They've either just gotten lucky in guessing at your exact address, or they've harvested it from somewhere on the internet.

 

I've had the problem for decades. Think of it as minor identity theft. Where it is a real problem is your legitimate email address gets blacklisted, and all of a sudden you have problems writing legit email. I had a lawyer's secretary who didn't get it, wound up giving up on my lawyer.

Other than that I wouldn't worry too much about it.

 

What can I say, another way spammers are scum of the earth.

Being hard headed and owning my email address since the early 90's I'm not giving it up.

 

Unless you are careless in giving out your email address on the internet, no.

You do need to be cautious about putting it in plain text where others can see. (addresses you don't want spam at, anyway). For example, don't put it in a thread on Majorgeeks, any bot can load the page, find it, and start spamming it.

The fact that they are doing it from your own address is probably just a coincidence, IF your address wasn't found out as per the above.

 

Not trying to say that changing the password is a bad idea, it can never hurt, but fail to see the relevance???

The account likely isn't compromised, only the address is being spoofed. With the right commands, any mail server can send messages from any address on any domain.

 

Alright, perhaps I've misread the OP.
The address isn't yours, but the name associated with the address is yours?

Ie. you have messages from LauraR which was sent from whatever account?

That's more-or-less the same story. Another spammer trick, this one a little more indicative of the spammer having harvested information somehow.

 

Nah, the email headers, (which Laura just PM'd to me) contain enough information for them to know that it isn't really HER sending the messages. (Turns out they're not even using her address, anyway, just her name)

It's the server in most cases that should be shut down. Turns out this message was sent from a server in Amsterdam, that is likely improperly secured. Spam protection really isn't the onus of the end user. Why should her account get locked because some jerk is pretending to be her?

My point is that I regularly change my email password, and it doesn't stop me from getting emails from myself. I really shouldn't have made an issue of it, it wasn't bad advice, really. My apologies.

 

The second post in the thread indicated it was spam.

 

Just as useful as you are, repeating what was already said