Ask Owen

I’ve recently started getting spam email and they seem to be coming from my email address. My virus scanner tells me my computer is clean, so is this something I should worry about?

The short answer is that there’s nothing to worry about. Spammers rarely use their own email address and sometimes use the same sender address as the receiver to fool your spam filter into thinking the email is legitimate. This does not mean that your computer is sending spam, just that your email address has made it onto some spammer’s list (which probably contains millions of email addresses)

It’s annoying when this happens, regardless on whether you’re being send emails to buy a fart cushion or try out the latest seo tool. The bottom line is that you can do nothing about it, but the good thing is that there’s no security risk to you here.

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