The “Sent” folder in our emails is where emails we send reside. This is where users can check emails to see if they’ve been successfully sent, so as you can imagine the panic and confusion you might experience if one day you were to check your email’s Sent folder, only to discover it has been filled with spam.This is pretty much what some Gmail users have been reporting on Google’s Produce Forums. According to the original post, “My email account has sent out 3 spam emails in the past hour to a list of about 10 addresses that I don’t recongnize. I changed my password immediately after the first one, but then it happened again 2 more times.”
It almost sounds like the person’s email was hacked, right? However the good news is that this isn’t the case. In a statement Google made to Mashable, this was apparently part of a spam campaign meant to make it look like users were receiving emails from themselves, which in turn caused Gmail to incorrectly file them under the Sent folder.
Google’s statement reads, “We are aware of a spam campaign impacting a small subset of Gmail users and have actively taken measures to protect against it. This attempt involved forged email headers that made it appear as if users were receiving emails from themselves, which also led to those messages erroneously appearing in the Sent folder. We have identified and are reclassifying all offending emails as spam, and have no reason to believe any accounts were compromised as part of this incident.”
Image credit – Mashable