Kathyrn asks:
I keep getting emails that say that they have been referred by my Gmail address. I don’t know anything about them. I usually delete them because I am afraid that if I report them as SPAM I will either lose my email or something else will happen. The problem is that I don’t know if these are being sent out to other people as SPAM emails from me. What can I do?
Kathyrn, it is very unlikely that those e-mails are actually coming from your e-mail address. I’ve talked before about why we sometimes get spam that appears to come from our own e-mail account before in this article.
But you shouldn’t be afraid to report Spam as spam. Gmail makes it easy, just click the drop-down arrow in the message. You can report as spam or identify scams that try to get your information by marking as phishing.
Those e-mails aren’t coming from you and your ISP will able to tell that. Marking them as spam or junk will help your e-mail filter them out and put them in a spam folder where you won’t be bothered with them.
~ Cynthia
Thanks – Same thing here. For the past month it appears that I am trying to sell myself Medications with 1, 2 or 3 emails rcvd each day. Reporting to ABUSE@xxxx seems useless though I want to protect my contacts from receiving same BS. Reading the FULL HEADER seems to get more difficult.
Cynthia’s answer though does not address the question: Are other people, my contacts in particular, getting emails from me that I did not send???
Jim, the emails really aren’t coming from you. The spammers just use e-mail addresses they get their hands on as the senders on emails. As I pointed out in the article I linked to, if the spam was coming from you, you’d see it among your sent e-mails.
Hello. And Bye.