I have just had an e-mail from someone, but the e-mail was not for me, but it was my e-mail address.  I replied to the e-mail (Genuine business user, checked before replying).  e-mail received back

>I apologise, but if you look at the properties of the email address of ****** ****** it came from your email address, and all I did was reply to the original.

And he is correct, but the name attatched to my address is not mine.  So, has someone been using my address, but if so how come I get the e-mails back here.

Can anyone help, please.

Worms can use an email address from someones address book

Thanks Mel, but does that now mean I have to try and find this person to let them know, or do I have to change my e-mail address. I really dont want to change it because it is my Affix. And I certainly dont want is used by anyone else.  I really have no idea about these things.

Do nothing but run an anti-virus check. Your own computer may not be infected. The worm works by trawling address books and then sends out viruses using the email addresses that it finds. It is possible that your email address was taken from someone elses address book and they have the virus. Emailing everyone in your address book to warn them could exasperate the problem if you are infected. Run a scan.

Many thanks admin. have just run a check, and thankfully I am virus free, so will leave it at that for the moment. 

Download Spybot (free!) and run it, it often picks up things that other anti virus programmes miss :)

Many thanks Mel. I use Sophos, but in the process of dowloading spybot now. Thanks again. :)

I had my email addy 'stolen', I phone my ISP for help, they advised me to log on and change my password.  The emails stopped immediately.  Apparently my addy and password had been 'phished' and was being used to send out emails that contained a virus even though I didn't have the virus.  Too technical for me - I'm blonde (bottle!)

My virus checker found two yesterday and blocked them.  God why can't some people get a real life?

I know the feeling
I had some *freak* posting on various boards under my user name :rolleyes:
sad or what :)

You do not need there to be a worm / virus on your computer for someone to send email from your address, it is incredibly easy to do it outlook, you can just change the address your email gets sent from to anything - sometimes people cant do it for various reasons and restrictions on their servers but its what spammers love to do.

If you can get the Full Headers of the email the person received from you, then you can see where the email was really sent from

Its all sorted now.  I managed to find the 'culprit'.  I had an e-mail quite a while ago from someone asking if I could trace or find out how true her Labs pedigree was. And for some reason I did not notice that when she replied to thank me her e-mail had switched to my own.  I found her original and sent her an email reply from that, and she has apologized, no idea how it happened, but said will get her son to look at problem when home from Uni. at the weekend.  This was a genuine error, and neither of us know how it happened. So, all sorted.  But it was worrying until I started looking more deeply into it. 
Kay