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Recently I've been receiving in my SPAM folder, SPAM mails sent "by me".

With "By me" I mean, that I am not sure if those are really sent from me.

It has been happening since December, at around one email per week. I've changed password 3 times. The last time, two weeks ago, I enabled two-step verification, so I guess no-one should be able to login without the verification code.

However, maybe those emails, are not really sent by me. AFAIK, you can send an email pretending to be someone other, and if you check headers of the email, you can see who actually sent it.

However, I'm a bit lost in security terms. I need someone to help me to find out if the e-mail I'm going to attach is actually sent by me, or by some other account under my name.

enter image description here

Green - My email. Yellow - Spam website.

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The Email system currently in use was designed in an environment where there was a high level of trust, there is no built-in checks to determine whether or not a sender is legitimate. Although this openness is one of the reasons email has been so successful it also has led to huge problems with spam, as anyone can send email to anyone with whatever source address they want.

In the case of emails supposedly sent by yourself the sender has "spoofed" your source email address. This is extremely common to see, but very ineffective as it is extremely easy to spot and filter out. After all, hotmail has a database of all the mail you've legitimately sent, it's child's play to match incoming mails to that and filter out any spoofed addresses.

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  • So this email, is not "mine"? I mean, did he access to my account, or not? Commented Jan 6, 2014 at 11:08
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    These emails could easily have been sent without any access to your account. Commented Jan 6, 2014 at 11:10
  • And with the SourceCode I've attached as screenshot, is there any way to know if he sent it without acces or not? Sorry, but I'm so lost :P Commented Jan 6, 2014 at 11:11
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    You didn't send source code, you sent an email header. I'm not an email header expert, however I would be very surprised if the sender had access, I don't think you need to worry about this. Commented Jan 6, 2014 at 11:27
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The received "from IP" address is the originating sender. If it is static or has not yet been reassigned you may trace it and see where it originates.

This IP might be the user who is spoofing your mail or a bot sending out emails. In both cases it is unlikely that the IP will be close to you or be assigned to your provider. The IP http://whois.net/ip-address-lookup/36.88.74.240 is part of some indonesian telco "telkom.net.id" provider for instance. Is it close to you?

To obtain proper knowledge you would need the mailer daemon logs from the server itself (which you won't get from hotmail). In those logs you can see whether the sender has authenticated itself with your user id and password, like e.g. outlook would do. In this case your login data leaked somewhere.

But I would assume that @GdD is right and somebody is spoofing. Happens a lot and all the time.

However there are tiny free apps displaying all passwords that are stored in outlook. If by any chance a trojan was on such machine outlook with all it's data can be easily compromised (Thunderbird/Firefox without master password too, of course).

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  • No, it's not close. I guess (and hope) it's spoofed. I've plenty of other emails and none of them have been accessed, so I guess I'm safe =) Commented Jan 6, 2014 at 11:58

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