Recently I received an email from a friend with "My" email to them attached. The email "I" sent them was obviously spam, one of those "You have to see this..." emails. The email had been sent to several people form my contacts list, but the email address sending the email was not my own, or one that I had ever owned. So of course I went through all of my email accounts, even my work email, and found no sent items matching the spam email that was sent. Because the email didn't seem to originate from any account that I owned I didn't see the point in changing the passwords on any of the accounts. It's my name, they are my contacts, but the account that sent the email is not mine. So obviously they have my name, and contacts, and have created this factious account and are sending spam to these people as me. I have no idea how to stop or prevent this?
I see my options as; Try sending an email to all of those people requesting that they block this email address that I don't own. Which would likely be categorized as spam its self, and possibly ignored. OR
Do nothing, and allow my friends to suffer more spam to their inboxes. OR
Email the false address, possibly confirming that the information they have is valid, resulting in who knows what.
The only kind of up side to any of this is that I know at least some of the addresses are so old that they no longer exist, but who's to say that the next time they won't use other contacts of people who actually exist, or that this isn't just the first wave and there will be more to come, possibly under a different email? I really feel stuck and frustrated.
After thinking about and writing this question the only way I can see this happening would be an app on a phone or device. Many of them want to access your friends, or contacts, which I'm always leery of. The one I'm usually most leery of are the ones who want to connect to my FB account. However none of these are from FB, they are all strictly email contacts, and I can't even narrow it down to one account because most of them I've shared with multiple accounts.
OK now I'm answering my own question, but I guess my next step would be to go through the names in the email, put each into one account until I come to one that doesn't auto suggest, when I find one that excepts them all I will have found my compromised account. Then I can cross reference that account with known apps, and sites that I've shared it with to try and find the culprit responsible.