Miss_Maxi_B said

To whom it may concern earlier this year friends told me that they received spam mails from me. One of them was forwarded to me. I checked that and found out that I was displayed as the sender but the e-mail address behind it was somebody else's. It was send to several of my contacts. Surprisingly those weren't contacts from only one of my e-mail accounts I'm managing with thunderbird. The contacts were from several of my accounts. I checked the e-mail address and learned that it belonged to an Italian company. I changed all my passwords instantly but forgot one rarely used gmail account. Last month I received another spam mail on my companies e-mail account which is not managed by thunderbird. Again I was displayed as the sender but the e-mail address belonged to an American company for alarm systems. I already contacted the company and waiting for a reply. Pls find attached a screenshot showing my problem. I'm not using a master passwort for thunderbird. Now my question is: how could this happen? Is it already solved after changing my password but my name and the robbed e-mail contacts are still in use? As my old computer crashed I'm not using thunderbird right at the moment. What can I do now? Looking forward to your reply. Best regards, Miss Maxi Bohn

How could this happen?

Simple really. Spammers pick a name. usually at random. But sometimes harvested from places like Facebook, twitter and LinkedIn and apply it to their mail so they look more legitimate. Harvesting may be as simple a pick a name from a web page to using the name of a person who gives access to their contact list on those sites to send mail to those contacts.

I am sure you are aware of those sign in pages that ask for access to your Facebook or other profile information which sometime also ask for access to ALL of your contacts in the small print.

Dear Matt

thanks for your quick feedback. Sounds logic and yes, I use do facebook but still this one question is left: if this dude had access to the contacts of my facebook related e-mail adress then why does he also have contact adresses from my other e-mail accounts. example: my account MAXI@whatever.com is linked to my facebook account the why does he also have contacts from my other e-mail account BOHN@work.com?

Best, Maxi

Your looking at this a little to literally. When this forum send you mail. Or you send anyone mail. both the sender and recipients email addresses are in plain text in the header. (That is part of the so called "Meta Data" governments drool over) It is not rocket science to actually pick this information off the wire as it goes past. I gave some of the simple techniques. They do vary a lot in sophistication.

There is only one business that pays more than SPAM. That is other cyber crime. So these folk have money, and lots of it, to develop their business models and pay really skilled people. Unfortunately you can actually find some of them as publicly listed companies because what they do is not illegal. Well not in the jurisdictions they operate in.