Occasionally you will receive a spam email that appears to be sent from yourself, or a bounce email suggesting you sent a spam email to someone else. Although disconcerting, usually you needn’t be concerned about this.

When you send an email, you can make the From: address anything you like, and there are many legitimate reasons for why you might do this.

Spammers, as you would expect, do not use their own email address in the From: field. Instead, they will either use a random email address from the list of email addresses they intend to spam, or they will use the recipient’s own email address in order to confuse the recipient.

It should be noted that certain viruses can cause your computer to send spam emails, so having up-to-date antivirus software installed is always important.