Email viruses from my own username?

[#1]

The catchall stops them sending to a non existent account but the from is irrelevant as that is just spoofed and isn't from your account at all even though you may think it is

[#2]

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@cyrilclark1 wrote:

Thanks for that very informative post; I have received several of these particular emails in the past few days.

What I find strange, however is that the 'Alert' is addressed to 'Dear Plusnet customer' and not to the user's name.

That seems to me to make the whole email suspicious.

Any ideas?

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I agree these alerts being addressed to "Dear Plusnet customer" makes them seem suspicious, and caution is the best policy. However this occurs because they are generated by the anti-spam/virus appliance which does not have access to your real name. All the information it has is that contained in the quarantined message and every-bit of that apart from the destination domain in "Envelope to" could be forged.

Note that "Plusnet" will be replaced by "Force9" or one of the alternative brands if appropriate - the appliance can work that out from the destination domain.

[#3]

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@LoneBee wrote:

It does feel like someone has hacked into my account, is the account safe if my email address has been "harvested"?

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@LoneBee "Safe" is a relative term; if its password has also been harvested the answer is "no". If it hasn't the answer is "maybe". You can find out if your email address has been harvested by checking on site https://haveibeenpwned.com/ . However a clean report there *doesn't* mean it isn't listed elsewhere. 

Changing passwords is the safest approach, but you have the option not to do this.

[#4]

@spraxyt Many thanks for the information about https://haveibeenpwned.com/ interesting and did not know about it.