My first thought is your system was mined. If they have that address it is unfortunately now obsolete, and must be replaced. I would be running all my malware scans and my AV just to start for a beginning of some peace of mind. I'm thinking bot here. I also would be all over Google researching this "outfit" using their name along with the keywords, e-mail, spam, malware, and virus. Each search would be independent so to keep the response report on the particular point. If you are comfortable sharing the "outfit" name it could help others. DA

I have no idea if you're using "Outlook", "Outlook Express", "Windows Live Mail", "Thunderbird" or something else but my guess would be that no, it didn't "just happen". If it were me, I'd probably take a second look at how I have it set up. I could be wrong though, I'm no expert. I only use web mail myself.

Yes, it's spam and it's called spoofing as mentioned. While it's not technically "dangerous" to open them, you could be asking for more spam by opening it. Often they'll put in a little code to tell if you've opened it and that verifies the email address. A verified email address is worth much more than an unverified one in the spamming world. Not unlike a known telephone number is worth more to a telemarketer. When you get this stuff, delete it, or pay the price. OJ, sometimes people will do the right thing and use BCC when they send mail to multiple people. They usually put their own address in the "To" field and "BCC" the others so addresses will be hidden. It's the right thing to do. Now that doesn't mean that it's *not* spam though! :) People who send to everyone in their address book and not BCC, and also the people who just forward hoaxes and other junk should have their computers confiscated.

I've had a yahoo email address that predates gmail, but now I have a gmail address as well. I've also had a hotmail address that also predates gmail, and I got that one because the only email that gets into my inbox is from people in my address book - everything else goes into the spam inbox, and I check that also to see if anything arrives there that I want to transfer to my address book. I use the hotmail address for any commercial transaction that I do and expect to get put on their mailing list. I do not think it is unreasonable to have three email addresses, and I used to have more - one was German, another Italian, and the third was French, and they were all on yahoo. I had separate identities for each of these because of yahoo groups that I wanted to join. Back then, I used yahoo messenger, and I would get simultaneous messages from my different identities. At least once I was carrying on a conversation with one person in German while carrying on another conversation with a different person in Italian. I think it helped my language skills and also made it easier for me to switch between German and Italian. I really do not like instant messaging any more, and I do not use it on facebook either, which I seldom visit anymore. As it turned out, the person I was chatting with in German was American, and he also lived in Los Angeles, and so it would have been much easier for us to have chatted in English, but it took us a while to realize this. I've had similar experiences in Mexico (and Costa Rica) with phone calls that I would start in Spanish and eventually realize that I was speaking with an American - or in the case with Costa Rica, a German who spoke English much better than he did Spanish.