Some Spammers Really ARE Stupid

It's not just gmail. I get some of that with the "sender" supposedly ME from my own domain. Those almost always end up in my spam folder. Another thing that's telltale about this is that the "from" is the actual email address; my actual email shows it being sent from Angela Edwards. You don't see my actual email address unless you open the email.

Iain, that explanation won't even win you the booby prize.

So in other words, his purpose is to destroy my reputation, get my ISP to
ban me and basically ruin my life.

Well, then it's stupid because it doesn't work.

I've been getting spam emails with my email address for years and nobody
has shut me down, and my sales this year have been better than ever.

So while the intentions may be to ruin me, they don't work.

I think C.G. has a great answer here and deserves the $5 grand prize

I would like to add that when you send out millions of emails you only need a tiny percentage of the people to either be curious enough or ignorant enough to open them and you'll make some cash.

As C.G. said putting your email as the sender gets it through spam filters and I'm sure that increases the open rate in spite of the savvy emailers that delete these messages without opening them.

I guess one of the reasons is because you won't report your own e-mail adress as spam.

This is new or uncommon. It's been going on in one form or another for years.

Right now there's a botnet that's sending its spam with the same name and email address as the sender and recipient both. I have 54 of them in my spam folder since yesterday afternoon.

So - No. No-one but you is getting those with your email address in the From.

In this case, the Return-Path: address is the same as the To and From address. That has some interesting technical implications for systems that accept and then bounce, rather than rejecting inline during the smtp session.

You could speculate all day long about why they chose that approach. Here's one:

The particular botnet in question is sending stuff with conspiracy theory and lurid subject lines, mostly about McCain, Obama and their wives. Perhaps the senders believe that seeing that kind of subject next to your name will make you more likely to open it.

Or, maybe, they're just testing the idea again. "Gotta put something there. Let's see if this improves results."

Or. Or. Or...

Trying to guess this stuff is a waste of time. We ain't gonna find out unless you hunt one of them down and ask him, just before you introduce him to Louis V.


Paul

The reason they use it is because it is a real, working, verifiable address.

Years ago, mail system administrators began to use sender address verification to accept or reject e-mail. Essentially, they would check the sender by trying to do a partial mail send to the address in the "FROM" field on an incoming message.

If they could contact the mail server listed in the MX record for the domain in the "FROM" field, and could try to send a message to the USER NAME in the "FROM" field and the sending system didn't reject the mail attempt with an "UNKNOWN USER" error, the receiving system would go ahead and accept the incoming mail.

So, this now rather useless method, simplified:

My mail server receives an incoming message from "fred@there.com". Before it actually accepts the message, it contacts "there.com" and says: "Hey, I have a message for the user in your system named fred". And if "there.com" says "ok, go ahead, we know that guy" then my mail system would go ahead and accept fred's incoming message. Fred was verified as a legitimate sender.

Again, this methodology came into vogue in the early 2000's and has since been virtually discarded as a useful method for reducing spam, because the spammers have just stolen everybody's legit addresses.

Glad I'm not the only one that thinks that way.