False emails

I hope this is in the right forum...

I have recently received three emails, from two email addresses. Both addresses are those of people I know. Two went to my hotmail address, and one to my gmail address.

All three emails contained spam. Fairly benign, a single link to an ad to work from home in the one I opened.

The senders did not know they had sent the emails.

How common is this? Should they ditch the email addresses and get new ones?

Thanks for any info you can give me.

 

I get spam e-mails from an account of a member of this forum who has passed away and i have sent really shi**y replies but they keep on coming.( i suspect someone has one of his old PCs)
Unless they are sending attachments (never open one of those) i would not worry too much just delete them.

 

Thanks for the reply.

These are active email addresses, though.

I get legitimate emails all the time from the people who own them. That's why I opened the link in the first one.

 

There are two ways you can get fake emails from people you know:

1. their web-based email account has been hacked
2. spammers have forged the "From" address

You write that you still get legitimate emails from these people, so option 2 above applies.

If you are interested to get to the bottom of this, analyze the email headers, and located the originating email address (in both legitimate and fake messages). This way you will know which messages are fake or real.

 

I can view the message source. Is that the same as the header? I remember being able to view the header years ago but I don't know how to do it in either Outlook or Gmail these days.

The source gives the return path as my friends email address, but says the email was:

Received: from nm31-vm0.bullet.mail.ne1.yahoo.com

 

I am not sure if this works in gmail or not but in yahoo mail you can hover your mouse over the email address with out clicking then look at the bottom of the web page in the gray message box I believe this will show you what you are looking for. any one who knows better please correct me if I am wrong.

 

Message headers: see http://support.google.com/mail/answer/22454?hl=en

To help you analyzing the headers, paste them into https://toolbox.googleapps.com/apps/messageheader/

 

So, google says the emails are coming from the legit addresses, via a couple of connectors.

Ditch the email addresses and get new ones? Big deal in one case, not so much in the other.

Maybe wait to see if it happens again, see if it continues to be a problem?

I'm not really up on the security thing.

 

If they are coming from the legit address, alert the users that their email accounts have been hacked.

 

Will do.

Does changing the password help, or should one just change the whole email address?

Would this be a human or a computer that did the deed?

One of the two email addresses I mentioned is the old hotmail address I had as contact on here. I looked at the recipients of the spam, and one of the members here got a message. I've contacted him.

The site here will not let me delete the email address from my details without entering another one, which I don't have yet.

 

Changing the password should be ok. they might have to deal with some ticked off people for a bit due to the spam though.

 

I have had this problem on three occasions. Some hacker(s) at various times guessed or otherwise worked out what my password was and sent spam to my acquaintances; and this also happened to two of my friends, where I at least, was the recipient of the spam.

I looked at the "to" field of the message I received and saw that it contained many names, they had probably just sent the massage to everyone in the friend's address book.

Changing my password, and advising my two friends that they were seemingly sending spam, and their changing their passwords, seemed to fix the issue.

Dumb_Question
23.March.2013
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