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al4629740Flag for United States of America

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Email spam - how the sender managed to get my email address in the sender field

So I received a cute little spam email saying that someone has taken over my account and wants me to buy bitcoin, yada, yada, yada.  The one thing they mention is how if I take a look at the sender information above its actually my email address.  Sure enough, its my email address.  How did they manage to get my email address to show up in the sender field?  Typically I usually see a bogus email address but this one is actually my email address.  I can see from the header its from a different email address but how did they get my email address to show up in that field?  Is it like a display name or something?

Is there a way to train average users how to spot these fraudulent emails.
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Jackie Man
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Email messages are just text.

Anyone can set any header, like From:, to any random string of characters, including your email address.

Just flag these all as SPAM + eventually your filtering software will sort them all correctly.
Just spoofed emails.  Turn your spam filter up a notch or two to stop them.
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skullnobrains

You probably should
- reject any email wihh mismatching envolope and from header senders
- enablf SPF