Thread: Spam take-off

I am concerned about the em ail addresses of some of the spams I am receiving. I noticed recently on some of the messages I received, that after the @ symbol the rest of their address is in fact the same as my own email address, which is personalised. Should I be worried about part of my address being used?

ln a word, no. Although it looks like spammers are using your email address for their own ends, that's not the case. The latter bit, called the domain, is personalised for us, so that we can have multiple addresses using the same second half. What the spammers are doing is called 'spoofing', which is faking part of the email address. It's an attempt to fool your ISP's email server into thinking the message is legitimate so that it will be let through the defences (if a sender and receiver share the same domain it's likely that they work for the same company, so emails between them are more likely to be let through).

The good news, such as it is, is that the spoofing is done on a personal basis. While you'll see emails that appear to come from your own domain. That means nobody will mistakenly think you're spamming them.