Computer Answers: Question About Email From Myself

In this newsletter lesson I want to answer a question from Lore
Grossman, a very nice lady who lives part time here on the island
and who I have helped in person for years now.

Lore has just run into a pretty common problem that she's been
lucky enough to avoid before. Maybe it's something you've seen
too and have wondered about. Well, in this email I'll explain it
for you and help you understand.

------------------------------------------------
Learn the secrets of skyrocketing your computer skills with the
five Plain English video lessons you can watch for free by visiting
the following address:
------------------------------------------------

Lore writes:

"Worth : I just received an e-mail FROM [here Lore wrote her own
email address which I have removed for her privacy]
Subject : Tired of waiting for you.
I KNOW that I have not send this to myself, and have NOT opened it.
Is it dangerous ? what and how should I dispose of it-- and WHO is
using my mail ?
Upset, Lore"

Well, Lore, it's nothing to worry too much about; it's just spam (i.e.
junk email).

I know it seems weird and maybe even kind of worrying that it is
coming in seemingly sent from your own email address. This can
conjure images of something out of that movie from the late 1970s
"When a Stranger Calls" where the call is coming from inside the
house.

Actually, it kind of *is* like that, except it's coming from inside your
neighbor's house, or your friend's, or somebody who knows you,
but not your own "house" (i.e. computer).

What has most likely happened is someone who knows you (or has
your email address in their address book at any rate) has probably
got an infected Windows PC.

Now Lore is smart enough to be using a Mac, which is basically
immune to all current viruses, so it's not her machine that's the
problem, nor is it any of her friends who also own Macs.

What a lot of people don't realize is that millions of Windows
computers are infected with viruses and worms without the owner
even realizing it.

Viruses and worms, by the way, are basically the same thing. The
only real difference is you have to open a virus yourself the first
time for it to infect your system or try to spread to another, while a
worm will spread on its own.

Another thing you may not realize is that most viruses and worms
these days are not about big, obvious damage the way they used to
be back in the day.

Originally, viruses (I'll just say viruses from now on, but understand
I'm including worms in most of what I'm saying) were written to
cause as big a problem as possible and basically were designed to
get as much attention as possible. A lot of them were written by
teenagers, actually, and it was done for much the same reason as
someone might "tag" a wall by spray painting graffiti on it -- to
show off and let people know they were there.

These days, viruses are now frequently written by programmers
who work for criminal organizations (think organized crime).

So they're motivated by profit, and what they try to do is lay low on
a person's computer and infect as many other computers in the
same sneaky way as possible, and use the resources of the infected
computer to do their dirty work.

This could be to harvest personal information for identity theft, or it
could be to group thousands of computers together to stage an
attack on an important website, or it could be just to send spam to
millions of computers, knowing that with millions of emails sent,
even if only a tiny percentage of people are willing to click on a link
for a purple pill in an email of gibberish, they can still make money.

What they usually do to make it harder to find the source of the
spam is they will "spoof" the return address to make it look like
it's coming from a different computer. Sometimes this means
you end up getting email "from yourself".

And this last option is what Lore has probably run into.

While it may not be trying to sell under the counter meds, and I
can't say for sure it came directly from an infected PC, it's some
kind of email she should just junk and not read.

The best thing to do with these types of emails where you know it's
spam is to use the "junk" or "spam" button in your email program.
This will mark the message as junk and in most cases remove it
from your inbox at the same time.

Don't ever use the junk or spam button to delete regular emails,
since this feature "trains" the computer to automatically junk
messages, and if you junk the wrong ones, you'll end up missing
important emails from people you want to hear from.

For those of you who understandably need to see step-by-step
lessons on how to do things like work with email and other parts of
using the computer, you might want to take a look at my easy video
lessons (available for either Apple Mac or Windows PC) you can
learn more by clicking one of the two following links:

Basic Mac Computer Skills

Basic Windows Computer Skills

until next time, take care, and enjoy,

Worth Godwin