You have struck an old hacking trick called “spoofing,” which means falsifying the originating address in an email.

The only real defense against spoofing is the screening done by email suppliers that discovery is hit or miss, although until they send email to your inbox. As an example, an e-mail service supplier can identify a spoofed email that originated within its own service. But, because of deficiency broadly recognized email security standards, it is more challenging to identify spoofed email from an external source.

Readers who use such email suppliers as Gmail, Outlook.com, AOL or Yahoo can attempt a technical trick which could briefly block junk. All computers that are on-line have this identifying number, and most security software may be set to block a certain IP address. But after enough blocked emails bounce back, the junk sender will simply use another PC with an alternate IP address.

Even though you can not quit spoofed email, you can prevent it. If an e-mail address has misspellings or is very long and includes blank spaces, it is likely junk. If a sender seems to be ask yourself if that sender would email you a message with links to click on.