Is my iCloud account safe?

Question

Something really weird happened to my iCloud mail account.  I received an email showing the sent address is my own iCloud address, which means I sent an email to myself, but I didn't!  It's clear a junk mail saying that you can earn some money by clicking a link. Of course I didn't click since the link may contain virus.
What I concern the most is how could someone sent a mail to me using my own address?  I am the only person using this account, my password security level is high and I'm the only one knows it. The only thing I can come up with is that my mail has been hacked. I changed my password immediately.  But how could that happen (as I said, my password security level is high and I just changed it several months ago)? If someone can do it once, he/she can do it again, right? I don't feel safe after changing my password.
Please, can someone give me some advise? Will my account be safe in the future? Is iCloud safe at all?

Answer 1

It's not at all likely that your account has been hacked or compromised. When people receive emails which appear to come from their own address but they haven't sent they naturally tend to be concerned: however it's most unlikely that anyone has hacked their account, they've just been targeted by one of two common spammers' techniques: both arise because it's all too easy to forge the 'from' address on messages to be something other than the real one.
There are two things that can happen. One is that the sender has forged the 'from' address to be the same as the 'to' address (so other people will see it coming from themselves, not you), presumably in the hope of confusing spam filters. It sounds as if that is what has happened in your case. It's harmless, if extremely annoying. Delete it (never ever answer spam or try to unsubscribe from it), and you don't need to be worried about it.
The other problem is that a spammer is forging your address as the 'from' address on a whole batch of messages. The first thing you hear about this is when you start getting bounce messages because the spam has been sent to non-existent addresses and is being bounced to you. There's no point at all in responding to it. It's infuriating but normally stops after a bit as they move on to another forged address.
There isn't really anything you can do about it: closing the account isn't really worth the hassle unless you are totally swamped, because you will have to tell everyone your new address. Apple can't really do any more than they already are about spam.