The common technique is that your email address appears on various web pages and cached Google pages, someone lifted it there and is forging email with your address. It's a technique that's been around for ages. One of the earliest was to use a virus to lift the Outlook Express address book out of your computer then spam out emails, impersonating your address.

This is one of the reasons that I've never used Outlook Express. This is also why I use different email addresses than the one that I use for conversational email to register for things like web forums. My iPhone monitors like six different accounts, only one is used for actual messaging.

This is also a reason why I never click on links from dodgy-looking emails. You get a feel for what represents a person's normal message content over time. I also rarely open emails where the subject line starts with "FWD: fwd: re: ...", which rules out most email messages from my dad. ;-)

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