Phony Email Addresses

I'm not sure if this is the proper forum so, if not, could someone on staff please move it?

For purposes of this post, the website and email addresses are fictitious and are used only to illustrate the problem.

My email service is provided by the host of my website, www.abc1xyz.com, and my email address is jim@abc1xyz.com. There is only one email account, and I am the only one with access to the account settings on the webhost's site.

The email service provides a fairly decent spam filter, and I receive a daily report listing the messages trapped by the filter, with the email addresses of the senders. It bothers me that I occasionally find listings for messages from senders such as elvis@abc1xyz.com or galpal@abc1xyz.com. I don't see the actual messages, so I can't check the headers for further information.

What I want to know is, how is this possible? In other words, how can someone send me a message using a phony email address, but which seems to be tied to my own email account? Calling the webhost's Help Desk for information is useless, as it's been outsourced.

Does anyone have an answer?

 

Thanks Arie,

I was just finishing a response to Steve's post when yours arrived. I'll hold off posting it until I can take a look at the Google search in your link.

 

Spammers

some spamming services will send the email message labelled as if it came from your own email account.
Standard tactics.
Go into your email account options and turn on mail headers if you can to "full " or "maximum ".
Look for the term "originating ip" and see if it is diffirent than the standard - sometimes that will be the services used ( yahoo does this as I recall) or your own ip (hotmail does this)>
This is all standard spammer techniques so I would not loose sleep over it.
Millions of other people have this done to them.

 

I was able to send myself a spam message from my account, using an entirely fictitious email address as the sender. I never thought it could be so easy. Thanks for the replies.