So your email is being spoofed? What that means is that someone who has you in his/her address book has a virus infected computer. The virus goes through that address book, sending emails to people in the address book, and making them appear to actually be sent from another address in that address book. In this case, your email addy.

The undeliverable emails are being sent from that same computer to addresses that no longer exist and being delivered to you because your email is in the header as the sender.

Nothing you can do about it short of closing that email account and creating another.

Scenario:

I received an email from my father-in-law's Yahoo account which was obviously a spam email requesting money.

When my father-n-law checks his sent email box in Yahoo he doesn't see that he sent any emails like the spam we all received.

Soo, what happens is...

Someone with an infected computer (typically a windows machine) has my father-n-law's contact information and now uses his email address as the from email to send the spam and they will probably continue to use it now that they have a working email address.

Anyway to trace where the email actually came from?

You can trace the email in most programs...

If you are using

Apple Mail and have the email open, click on View - Message - Long Headers

Outlook and have the email open, click File - Properties - Details

Look at the Received Headers

	Received: 	from web51911.mail.re2.yahoo.com () by host.hostmonster.com with smtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1NCUQ4-0008A6-Vv for joeuser@gmail.com; Mon, 23 Nov 2009 01:37:13 -0700


	Received: 	(qmail 20108 invoked by uid 60001); 23 Nov 2009 08:37:12 -0000


	Received: 	from  by web51911.mail.re2.yahoo.com via HTTP; Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:37:12 PST

Looking at the above example, this email touched three mail servers. The bottom one is where it started, then the next one up is the next hop and the top one is the destination.

For example in the above I would enter the two IP addresses I see

206.190.48.74 (which appears to be a legit Yahoo Server)

41.219.192.109 (which appears to be the source of the spam)

You can go to a site like Whois.Net and enter the IP Address you see in the received headers to see where the email is coming from.

More information found here

So in your example, the person sending the email, sent it from a machine with an IP address of 41.219.192.109 but we can't do anything about it?

Isn't it illegal to use someone else's information?

Seems like it would be but I'm not sure. Of course many of the spoofers are out of country and you probably can't do anything about it then.

I did run across sites that provide people with the ability to send these types of emails.

hoaxMail - Anonymous Spoof Email and SMS

This site walks through how to pretend to be someone else using there email. So in other words, helping people spoof your email address.

Feel free to contact these two websites and let them know how much you appreciate there help in assisting web criminals.

To bad we couldn't translate the source IP address into there email address and spoof them back.