Spam email with your address as the sender’s address

Question: When I checked my email the other day I received a spam email that had my address as the sender’s address. Has someone stolen my address, or is this even possible?

Answer: It’s not because a spammer has hijacked your e-mail account and is spamming the world using your identity but because the spammer is disguising the true sender of the e-mail with a different address, a process called e-mail spoofing, to target you specifically. In e-mail spoofing, the sender manually constructs the e-mail header and chooses which information (your e-mail address as the sender, for example) to include. They do this to try to get you to read the e-mail and/or click on the hyperlinks contained in the e-mail. The best thing to do with something like this is just ignore and delete the email, just as you would do with any spam email.

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