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When you send spam to yourself

A regular Internet surfer usually did not blink at unsolicited junk mail in his Hotmail account, but a piece of spam recently caught his eye. It looked like he sent an ad for a dream vacation to himself, because his email address appeared on the “sender” line.

“The funny thing about it was that there was no sponsor name anywhere to be found on the message,” said the surfer. “They did ask for all of your demographics, including credit card information.”
He isn’t the only Hotmail customer receiving unsolicited self-addressed spam. A marketing consultant in Ontario said she received two similar spam messages with her Hotmail email address listed as the sender — one promoting university degrees and another with a tongue-in-cheek header “Tired of Spam?” “The other one contained an HTML page with two clickable lines, and I think it was headed up, “‘Tired of Spam? Click here,’” she said. “Of course I don’t click those puppies because I’m pretty sure it’s a way to scan my login and password.”

Microsoft’s free Hotmail and other free email service providers expressed no surprise at the two findings. They say concealing the actual sender’s email address with the recipient’s address is an old-school tactic spammers use to trick people into clicking on their message. “You can pretty much make the ‘from’ address be whatever you want it to be,” said John Movena, co-founder and vice president for the anti-spam group Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE). “Spammers have always put fake addresses, they never use their real addresses. But for some reason, they try to confuse people by using the recipient’s address instead.”

Emails to and from the recipient usually contain HTML hyperlinks. When the user clicks on it, spammers are informed the account is active, according to Christopher Duxler, co-founder and managing director of free email service provider MailStart.com.

The spammer then uses that information to send more spam or sell the email address, he said. “By opening up that piece of spam the spammer knows he got you,” Duxler said. Unfortunately for the irked recipients of this type of spam, there isn’t much they can do. If users choose to have their filters weed out mail sent from their own email addresses, they won’t be able to receive messages they forward to themselves.

The best remedy is for users to filter these messages into bulk mail folders they can later sift through. “Set up one filter to filter messages ‘from’ you to a special folder,” Duxler said. “Chances are everything will be spam. However, if you sent yourself something it would also end up in that folder so a user would just need to make sure they looked in that folder for messages they sent to themselves.”

But Duxler, a Hotmail customer support representative, and CAUCE’s Movena say there is an even more common-sense approach to combating spam: Don’t give out your email address on websites, bulletin boards, and chat rooms. “Another option is to have two email accounts,” Duxler said. “One account you provide to friends and family, the other you use to sign up for Internet services like websites.

Chances are you can keep your personal account relatively spam-free because you will not be giving it out to any service.” Meanwhile, yet another problem is plaguing Hotmail: Some users of the service are getting a bogus message, purportedly from a company official, threatening to cancel their accounts because the service is bogged down with too many customers.

Microsoft quickly responded by saying the message was a prank and that Hotmail was in great health. “It’s a chain email that is a hoax. There is no truth in it whatsoever,” said company spokeswoman Jessica Dobberstein. She said Microsoft does not know how many Hotmail users received the bogus message. Microsoft is considering posting a message on Hotmail telling users to ignore the crank e-mail, Dobberstein said.

The message, allegedly from a “Jon Henerd” of the “Hotmail Admin. Dept.,” tells recipients they will be kicked off the service if they do not prove they actively use their accounts by forwarding the e-mail. “Hotmail is overloading and we need to get rid of some people and we want to find out which users are actually using their Hotmail accounts,” said the message.

The message itself was contradictory, saying, “So, within a month’s time, anyone who does not receive this email with the exact subject heading, will be deleted off our server. Please forward this email so that we know you are still using this account.” Then, it referred to forwarding the email rather than receiving it. “If you do not pass this letter to anyone we will delete your account,” it said.

Bought by Microsoft in 1996, Hotmail has 68 million users and more than a quarter-million new customers signing up every day, according to Microsoft. The service lets users send and receive e-mail for free from any computer connected to the Internet.