Email in Sent box not sent by me?

Possibly you were hacked. You might have downloaded or opened one of your friends emails that was also infected and before you knew it, your computer / email account is being used to send out spam, and your friends and strangers are now receiving spam appearing to come from your address. Sounds like your account has been compromised, and you should therefore scan your system with anti-virus and spyware programs to begin with.

Are you using Yahoo mail be chance? That would explain a lot.

I got my account hacked and cannot retrieve it because
nothing works since all the information seems to have
changes including the secret question and phone number
etc.

-Ray Edwards

If you are able to login to your yahoo account, then it is possible that your account is not hacked. It appears that there is a trojan on your system. This happened to me many years back when I had installed a malware on my system. The trojan used to not only mail all contacts in my contacts list, but it would also send chat messages to my yahoo messenger friends. The problem solved after I formatted my computer and reset my yahoo password.

Email jacking is hugely popular (and profitable).

Storm Botnet – AKA “Storm Worm” – Trojan horse that spreads via compromised email (once infected over 50,000,000 computer systems)

PS: Email address spoofing is possible; everything you can imagine does and will occur.

What you want to do, is hit "reply", and see what the address looks like.

Also, you want to change/secure the following:
1) email password
2) email recovery options (attached email, attached phone, security questions).

Additionally, run a thorough scan on your computer to see if you're botted.

I recommend these resources:
http://www.eset.com/us/online-scanner
http://housecall.trendmicro.com

(run them both, in that order, one after another).

Your email account possible is been hacked. If you knew that you don't send the messages I suggest that you need to change your password and security question asap. And immediately report it to the administrator if that is yahoo mail, gmail or any webmail site.

Regards,
John Lagoudakis

Do you use this email address for your Webforms in one of your sites/blogs?

yes it possible you got hacked,change your password from time to time to avoid these attacks

Same thing happened to me last year. Some person sent adult links to my contact list, i immediately changed my password and details.

Thanks for the replies.
I have a paid AVG Internet Security 2012 installed and it does not show any problems.
I changed my password with my Email and do not have this Email address with any of my websites etc.
I did have another Email address that was hacked, but no problems since changing the password for that.
Some of my wordpress sites have been under attack with the attacking IP addresses blocked due to the many measures I have taken to protect the sites.
So, still not sure how my sent items outbox could contain emails I did not send?

Hotmail used to be the pits for this a couple of years ago, since their lapsidasical security let the bots in I haven't used it since. Even if you have your own POP3 hosted mailbox from your own webhost, there are commands you can use via telnet that will enable the sending of email from your SMTP server on behalf of the server owner, although most good hosts lock these vulnerabilities down now. Check your Wordpress installation with the Exploit Scanner plugin too just in case. If you are running a VPS you should keep a check on your mail queue and server logs.

If you are seeing this issue when collecting POP3 mail via Outlook or another client on your local machine check with your host if they require SMTP authentication to be on (they should). This means a password is required to access the SMTP server and send an email, if they don't require this that's bad news and could leave your mail sending wide open.

And changing passwords frequently is also a top security tip that most people just don't bother doing (you are using good secure passwords with not only alpha numerical but also other characters too such as (%=$ and suchlike right?)

Best of luck!!