Yes, this might had happen to you. You'll be wondering in confusion (while scratching your head ) , how on earth you, yourself received an email sent by you (with your own email address as the sender of the mesaage)...! and you're pretty sure that you did not send yourself an offer claiming you've just won $1mill jackpot prize! This is what expect said as a self-sent spam.

Why is that so? It’s not because a spammer has hijacked your e-mail account and is spamming the world using your identity but the reason is because the spammer is disguising the true sender of the e-mail with a different address, a process called email spoofing (Forging an email header to make it appear as if it came from somewhere or someone other than the actual source) to target you specificall.

In e-mail spoofing, the sender manually constructs the e-mail header and chooses which information (in this case your e-mail address as the sender) to include.

Why do the spammers do this? To get you attention to read the e-mail and/or click on the hyperlinks in the email. Sometimes the spammers want you to buy the products they are peddling (attention grabber!); sometimes they want you to click on the link contained in the e-mail, which signals them that their e-mail message received a live account with a curious human at the other end, and they can then sell your e-mail address to other spammers as a potential audience for more spam from a different source. Sometimes it is for both these reasons and also to bypass filters set up through the e-mail client.

So, make sure you switch on your spam filter!

(source : http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2003/SelfSentSpam.asp, http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/E/e_mail_spoofing.html, www.haanchiang.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11)

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