returned mail from messages not sent

Hello Michael.

More than likely, your email address has been "spoofed" on a Windows PC that was infected with a virus and the infected user has your email address in their address book.

Such a virus sends an email with infected file attached to all contacts in the infected user's address book and randomly selects an address from the address book as the sending address for the message.

This occurs without the infected user's knowledge and this allows the virus to spread more easily since most people are more inclined to open an attached file received from an email address they recognize or doesn't appear to be sent from a spammer.

Or your email address was "harvested" by a spammer who is using your email address as the sending address for bulk spam mailings.

On occasion, I receive spam sent from an old email address of mine (appears to be sent from me to me which I did not send) which indicates this email address was harvested and being used by a spammer as their sending address.

Does anyone know how to make it stop? My mac Mail app is kinda freaked because of this problem. The mail accound that has been "spoofed" just keeps spinning it's wheels like its checking for mail only it never stops. How do I clear this up? I seem to not be able to receive or send any email. It's as if the whole thing is clogged. It's been like this for a couple of days. Restarting doesn't fix it. Also, When I delete the offending emails, they come back as being read when I go to a different mail box and then come back to the mail box for the affected account. Does this make sense? very frustrating.

Hey there... I was going to say, I definitely agree with Allan. But I was going to add that back when this was happening to me a little bit (it was especially interesting when my ISP would send me an e-mail saying that a message that I sent could not be sent because it was found to have a virus in it... but I had never seen these e-mails before that I supposedly sent, and didn't recognize any of the addresses!), I reported it to my ISP's fraud department (simply by forwarding these messages to their department, writing a sentence at the top saying that I had never sent the message that was being referred to), and after not too long, it completely stopped. It hasn't happened now for quite some time. You might consider doing this if you have a good ISP that could take care of it (mine was Earthlink). I hope this helps!