2026-09-26
Spam from your own email address: usually a forged sender, and how to tell if you were hacked
Most spam that arrives 'from' your own address is a forged sender field; your account was never touched. Japan's IPA and JC3 have both warned about extortion emails made to look like this, and IPA says its help desk has not seen a single case of footage actually being released. This site's view: the sender can write anything in the From field. Before you panic, spend five minutes on three places — Sent, sign-in history, forwarding rules. And if the email quotes a password you still use, change it today.