I received a spam mail from my own email address. Has my email account been hijacked?

This is the first time that has happened.


Lately I have noticed that some mails (to addresses that I am sure are correct) go through okay, and others don't. Either I get one of those undeliverable notices, or the person I am sending it to just never gets it. If I resend send the same mail later on it usually goes through fine. Same thing receiving mails. Could I have been hijacked? What should I do?



I received a spam mail from my own email address. Has my email account been hijacked?
It's not you that infected it's one of your friends. Let me explain


Most spam is sent from infected PCs, but the malware tries to hide the identity of the infected computer. To that end, it spoofs (forges) the Sender address.





A little more detail: The malware searches the infected PC's hard drive for e-mail addresses and sends spam out to them. But it also uses some of these addresses for spoofing purposes. So if you get spam from yourself, that means someone with your e-mail address has an infected computer.





What can you do about it? Not much. But if only a few people have your e-mail address, you might try letting them know about the problem. One of them has an infected PC.
Reply:Spoofed emails are easy to create; the fact you got one from "yourself" doesn't necessarily indicate your email has been hijacked. You could check your Sent folder to see what you have sent. Any number of things can cause an undeliverable email; network issues, server issues, or a wrong address. A person won't receive emails if their Inbox is too full; maybe it's an issue on the recipient's end. For a sanity check, you could try emailing from a different email account to see if you continue to notice the same issues.