Something quite strange happened. I was reading me emails, and noticed one from my mom. I opened it, and it had an attachment. The attachment was a pic of me, on my uni, which was taken by someone else last weekend. The only place I know to see this pic is in someone’s photo album, in the gallery of this forum.
I was curious about where she got it from, and I asked her about it. She said that she had not sent me an email lately, nor had she ever seen that pic.
As far as I could tell, someone got into her account, and sent the email with attachment to me.
Does that mean that someone has access to my mom’s or my pc?
Is this likely a hacker?
Does anyone know anything about these things, or what I can do?
That’s really strange. Do you live near her? Any sleep walking or binge drinking lately?
Can you check the email, open the email’s properties detail and see if the server pathway and the computer IP address are the same as from her normal emails.
It’s pretty easy to spoof a username and email address, so one of your buddies m ight be pulling your leg.
Either what podzol said, or maybe your mom left her account signed in, and somebody, maybe a close friend or relative was on it and sent a picture to you.
Wait, what was the body of the message? or was there just an attachment?
Actually it’s quite simple to make an email appear to have come from someone else. Spammers use that technique all the time. The displayed From: field can be replaced by the content embedded in the message headers. In other words, you tell the mail server to deliver a message to someone/from someone, but can choose to change what is actually displayed to the recipient when they retrieve it.
That being said, we checked my mom’s account, and it also showed the email having been sent at the same time. Based on that, is what you’re saying still possible?
Well we’re entirely off-topic now so one more reply can’t hurt us. You say that you checked her account. Does that mean that there was a copy of the suspect email in the sent items folder? That would indicate that yes indeed it was sent from that system.
You can also look at the message you received in your inbox. If you have MS Outlook, you can highlight the message, right mouse-click, select Options and at the bottom there is a section called Internet Headers. It is a map of where the email originated and the route it took to get to you. Compare the headers of the suspect message to a control message that you send from your Mom’s system. I sent a sample to your PM. If the point of origin matches the suspect and the control message that you have sent from the same system then yes it came from her computer.
What kind of an idiot do you take me for… you think I’d do that and forget about it 2 days later… you honestly believe I’m that dimwitted, that moronic, that…
…yeah… I did do it. I wasn’t gonna say nothing, knowing i’d be teased some about it… but I actually did come to realize that I had done it. I must find it quite easy to amuse myself… I just play tricks on myself.
So… let’s hear what you have to say about that MacKenzie.
My advice going forward is that whenever you send yourself an email send another one reminding yourself that you sent one to yourself. It will help avoid undue public confusion.
