Someone is using my email address to send out email that I never sent.

If you receive bounce messages for mail that appears to originate from your account, you find messages in Spam from 'me', or you receive a reply to a message you never sent, you may be the victim of a 'spoofing' attack. Spoofing means faking the return address on outgoing mail to hide the true origin of the message.

When you send a letter through the post, you generally write a return address on the envelope so the recipient can identify the sender, and so the post office can return the mail to the sender in the event of a problem. But nothing prevents you from writing a different return address than your own; in fact, someone else could send a letter and put your return address on the envelope. Email works the same way. When a server sends an email message, it specifies the sender, but this sender field can be forged. If there is a problem with delivery and someone forged your address on the message, then the message will be returned to you, even if you weren't the actual sender.

If you've received a reply to a message that wasn't sent from your address, there are two possibilities:

1. The message was spoofed, forging your address as the sender.
2. The original sender used your address as a reply-to address so that responses would be sent to you.

Neither of these possibilities indicates that your account was compromised, but you may stop this type of email immediately by adding the processing rules so that whenever the field 'from' contain your email address, it will be sent to the Junk folder. However, this only applicable if your are not sending/cc yourself an email. 

Please follow the steps given below to create the processing rule:-
 
1. Log on to the Webmail (http://mail.yourdomain.com) and log in by using the user account.

2. Roll over your cursor over the 'Settings', expand 'Filtering' and select 'Content Filtering'.

3. Click the 'New' button and check the 'From specific addresses' under 'From Address'. Press 'Next'  button

4. Enter your own email address in the the 'From Specific addresses' field. Press 'Next'

5. Simply enter any name for this rule at 'Rule Name' field

6. Check the 'Move message to folder' and select 'Junk E-Mail' at the Folder drop down menu under the  'Actions'

7. Click 'Save' and you have done.


* This is ONLY applicable for SmarterMail user(s)
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