All my spam is "Undeliverable", What's up?

Question

Lately, all the spam I receive seems to be undeliverable messages, ie messages I did not send that are coming back to me as undeliverable mail or failure notices.
Most of the time I don't even recognize the address that I "apparently" sent this mail to, though sometimes the address is a twist on my own email address. The attached messages that could not be sent are usually for stock tips or some other frequent spam topic.
Is this the very latest in spamming or does this indicate a possible virus in my Mac? Is this happening to anyone else?
Thanks!
Drelika

Answer 1

Lately, all the spam I receive seems to be undeliverable messages,
ie messages I did not send that are coming back to me as undeliverable
mail or failure notices.
These returned email error messages indicating a message or messages you did not send are undeliverable are not spam but the original message that was undeliverable was sent by a spammer.
This indicates a spammer used/forged your email address to appear as the sending email address for a bulk spam mailing or mailings.
For most email accounts, there is nothing preventing a user from providing any email address to appear as the sending email address for an account which is entered in the Email Address field for the account preferences or by entering a different Reply To address in the message header.
Apple prevents doing the first with a .Mac account and although there may be some other email account providers that have the same restriction, spammers don't use such email accounts to send their garbage.
Since your email address is likely included in a spammers "known good" email address list, he/she can pull a random email address from this list to appear as the sending email address for a bulk spam mailing with the sending address constantly being changed or a spammer has taken over a Windows PC remotely and is using the email client on that PC to send out bulk spam mailings and your email address is included in the email client's address book.
Unfortunately, there is nothing you can do about this.