Apparently I just sent myself a spam email - how can this be?

[DixiePixie]

I seem to get lots of spam email to my yahoo account - it's amazing how many lotteries I've won and how many people want to give me the chance to make millions

Anyway, in my bulk mail box, I've received yet another "lottery win" - but it is telling me that I have received the email from myself (i.e. from my own email address).

How can this be? Does this mean that someone else has been able to nick my email address, or that other people might be receiving spam seemingly from me? I'm very confused (you may gather from this that I'm not much of a computer genius...)

The "from" field is often fake. I get tonnes of spam to a particular address and a fair few are from myself. I also get several "undeliverable mail" things referring to emails I@ve not sent.

So, your email address has been harvested from, eg, a yahoo group and the spammers just shove in a random name from the spam list into the from field. They don't actually send mail from your account.

Thanks SoupDragon. That's a relief, though still pretty annoying in that someone is using the name.

I'm in a yahoo group, which I think is why I get so much spam in the first place. One spammer accidently put everyone their email was going to in the "to" field, and I noticed it was being sent to quite a few people in my yahoo group.

I mentioned this to the person who set up the yahoo group, though she said there was supposed to be security in place so noone else could get in. Not sure if anything can be done about it.

Hope no one is going to receive spam and think that I sent it to them

no, everyone with a yahoo account gets lots of spam, because spammers simply write programmes to send emails to random words@yahoo. It probably isn't the group.