Spam: Your own email address as the sender - what to do?

If spam emails with your own email address are sent to other people as sender, your account does not always have to be hacked. CHIP readers tell us that they have changed their password, but still seem to send criminals spam from their account. We explain what is behind it and how you can protect yourself.

Your own email address as the sender of spam mails

If a GMX, Gmail and Co. mail account has a new and secure password, it is difficult to hack. Nevertheless, it always happens that your own email address appears as the sender of spam mails. That is behind it:

• This quite new phenomenon is so-called "mail spoofing". For this purpose, criminals have created a program in which you can connect to the server of the mail provider. Then you can choose not only the recipient, but also the sender of an email - for example, your email address.
• It then appears as if you wrote the email or your email account was hacked. You cannot do much yourself anymore.
• Recipients of such emails can often quickly recognize that it is a spam email. Most of the time, the email asks for a password for PayPal or a transfer with Western Union. Fortunately, this makes potential victims pay attention.

Your own email address will be misused - so protect yourself

Mail spoofing is very difficult to prevent:

• Preventive measures: Spammers often send thousands of e-mails with good luck to similar e-mail addresses. Do not give the senders of spam emails confirmation that you have received the email. Otherwise, the fraudsters know that the address is real and misuse it, for example, for mail spoofing.
• Therefore, do not open any mail if you can already tell by the subject and sender that it is spam. For emails from companies like PayPal or Dropbox you should never click on links. Instead, you always open a new website yourself and enter the address of the page there.
• Measures when it is too late: Only the email providers have options to prevent mail spoofing. That is why Google, for example, offers Gmail for its mail service to report spam.
• What happens then? The mail providers often only solve this problem by closing the relevant mail account. However, if people become victims of mail spoofing more often, they can at best trace the original sender, put them on the blacklist and remedy the security vulnerability.
• Tip: If you have your own domain with your own email address, you can use the "Sender Policy Framework" with most providers. It protects against such abuse. You can find instructions from your provider under the keyword "Sender Policy Framework".

On the next page, we'll show you how to identify phishing emails that scammers use to access your account information.