Is this a virus?

[Ed62]

I received an e-mail that had a very nasty subject line. The address it came from was mine! At least it appeared that way. I didn't open it. Just deleted it. I don't think my computer is infected because there are only a few sites I visit, and I'm confident they're OK. I checked my wife's e-mail. She did not receive it. If my computer was sending it, wouldn't everyone in my address book receive it?

Ed

[dbhost]

I received an e-mail that had a very nasty subject line. The address it came from was mine! At least it appeared that way. I didn't open it. Just deleted it. I don't think my computer is infected because there are only a few sites I visit, and I'm confident they're OK. I checked my wife's e-mail. She did not receive it. If my computer was sending it, wouldn't everyone in my address book receive it?

Ed

A lot of viruses spoof the sending address. Chances are excellent you are in the address book of someone that is infected, and their computer is shooting these emails out with your email address as the from line.... This isn't exactly a new virus / spam trick, this has been around since the late 90s that I know of, probably earlier...

[leehljp]

You are very fortunate that you are just now getting one of these. I have been getting spoofed mail for what seems like 10 years.

What gets me is the spam-mails that have alphabetical listing of people on one of my ISPs. Not all of the people are listed but those in the K's or L's for me. This was obviously done by a mining (miner) software that attached to the ISPs system and "pinged" for active users.

[Ed62]

Thanks for the replies. It makes me feel a little more comfortable.

Ed

[LCHIEN]

probably not a virus in your machine. Someone elses machine is spamming your mailbox. Spammers often substitute anything for the return address field (sender) because they want to be anonymous. So they often use
1. random made-up e-mail address
2. real e-mail addr they farmed to make it look legit
3 your e-mail (e.g. the same as they are sending to).

The sender field is just a data block in the e-mail format, its easy to put anything you want in it. You can do it if you want by going into your e-mail setup. But legitimate e-mail programs don't expect you to change it often.