Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

Question

How can i stop spam that is using my own email to email me?

Dec 30, 2013 8:54AM PST

I am getting many emails about making money online from myself and every time they come they use a different person in the signature and do not put a link to get off the list.
They come in to my email address from my same email address. When I tried to block, ( I am using outlook), it said that I cannot block my own email. When I tried to filter the senders never use the same words so I cannot even filter them out. This is very frustrating as this is my main email for business as well as personal.
is there any thing I can do besides getting another email.
Helpl!

appledon

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Answer
(NT) Try changing your password - works for me.
Dec 30, 2013 9:51AM PST
- Collapse -
Answer
Email issue
Dec 30, 2013 11:31AM PST

Sounds as if you likely have a malware infestation, I'd suggest Malware /Spyware scans. You could try changing passwords and or totally changing your email address. Probably the best thing to do would be to ditch outlook and use something more secure, Gmail via Mozilla Firefox would do the job.

- Collapse -
Answer
The very first thing to do ...
Dec 30, 2013 6:09PM PST

is to see from where it's send. That's shown in the e-mail header. Different e-mail programs have different ways of viewing the header, so I can't tell how you must do that.

There are 2 possibilities:
1. It's send from your e-mail account somebody logs into. In that case, change the password and it should stop.
2. it's send from a different server (say, one in China), but they use your e-mail data in the header to pretend it comes from you.

The data of the originating server should tell the difference, if you compare such a mail with a mail you really sent yourself.

Kees

- Collapse -
second choice most likely
Jan 1, 2014 8:49PM PST

If the email is originating from outside your country area, you can/maybe block entire country IP addresses which will stop anything from there coming through to you. It depends on what's available to you from your ISP provider. If you have a server account and your mail is connected to that domain name, you possibly have the IP blocking available to you. Just imagine how much spam gets blocked if you cut out Russia, Nigeria, and China. Since you use this for business you are a bit limited in how much blocking you can do. If it was a private home email account then you could set positive filters which means ONLY the email addresses you'd approved could come through to you and all others would be blocked, but even that wouldn't stop emails using your own email address. If you aren't using your own domain name on a server with mail service, or can't block IP address ranges, then your choices are mostly limited to what blocking you can do at your ISP webmail interface and then what you can do with your own email client software used for IMAP or POP3 mail service. Blocking at the ISP webmail by marking such emails as SPAM or JUNK will add to that ISP's process of stopping spam and might be effective since your ISP likely will also use IP blocking software for their email server. Your contribution of such spam alert helps them identify and block it by IP address too.

- Collapse -
Answer
In the event that you ran all the usual Malware
Jan 1, 2014 1:37AM PST

detectors, it is likely that the problem is not with your machine but is with the machine of someone you know.

That machine gets compromised and the malware scours the machine scooping up every email address that it can find, not just the address book, it even gets email addresses from the web pages they have visited.

Using it's own email program, it creates the email and selects a bunch of email addresses from the pile it collected.
Choosing one of those at random, it uses it as the FROM address.

You just got unlucky enough to have your address chosen.

If you are sure the stuff is not coming from your machine, then there is nothing you can do about it. Ignore it and it will eventually stop.

P

- Collapse -
Thank all who have answered my query.
Jan 1, 2014 10:35PM PST

I have tracked the ip to India, so that is no help. I am starting with the simplest answer by changing my password. and then just waiting it out. But I have learned a lot from your answers and all is appreciated.
Thanks again.
Appledon

- Collapse -
Answer
Get the IP address it's sent from
Jan 1, 2014 8:59PM PST

I've had success in past by contacting the company which the IP address was used by and informing them they had a spammer using their network. Remove your email address from the header information and post it here and maybe you can get some more exact advice on what to do, some info on where the email is actually originating from. You can check the IP at arin.net but I suspect it will direct you to another such as apnic.net or afrinic.net, which are for the Pacific area and African areas.