Imposters

Last night I started to notice that my Google Mail's "Spam" box was filling at a pretty rapid rate. One of the reasons I chose GMail to begin with years ago was because of its really good spam filters, but at the rate the numbers were climbing I began wondering if something was up. Oh, something was up all right. I had become (in the eyes of the unknowing world) a SPAMMER!

The email was the standard Nigerian scam of a bequest to the recipient that had fallen to the sender, in this case "me"  Rev. David Wilson, a parish priest in London England, to handle. The email address was slightly different than mine on the outgoing end but in the details they had "spoofed" my email address. It's stopped now - I guess Google figured out what was happening. But to the thousand or so people who go the spam sent under my name, I'm a spammer.

You could be too.

There's really not a lot you can do to prevent this. After checking to make sure it wasn't a hijack of my account (it wasn't) and alerting Google that was about all I could do. The spammers just take an email address they know is good to try and make their emails look safe so the filters won't catch them. But they normally do get caught by the better filtering technology. Still, it's no fun feeling like people all over the world think you are something that you know you are not.

Although... I've always wanted to live in England. ;)