MacMail just sent an email on his own... malware?

[ZeGuy]

Ok, I'm kinda freaking out at the moment

MacMail just sent an email on his own. I never heard of typers of malware on Macs that can do that, but it happened... I was at my computer when I heard the typical sound of a mail being sent.

I checked, and a mail was actually sent from MacMail.. and it must be some kind of malware, because the object was in italian (I am Italian, obv) and was something like "Warning" and the body of the mail was this one:

Dearest One,

Accept my apology if this mail in any way offends you. However, please give attention to it if it interests your person.

I am Ms. Nour Abdel Salam a Canadian with Lebanese origin. I am a widow, as I lost my husband i


I promptly checked if other mail like that were sent in the past, nope.
I checked if there was a spam mail with that body that I could have somehow incidentally sent, nope.
I downloaded ClamXav but it hasn't found anything wrong.

Now I don't know what to do and I'm kinda scared, since I have not sent that mail, but still there it is... luckily it was sent to another of my mail addresses so no damage there, but another thing was that it was sent right at midnight, 00:00... which I'm sure is not a coincidence.

Can someone help me? :/

 

[benwiggy]

Was there a copy of the email in your "Sent" (Inviato) Mailbox? If there IS a copy of the email in your Sent box, then that is worrying. But also very unusual.
You are sure that no one else has had physical access to your computer?

If you "send" no more emails, then I wouldn't worry.

At the very least, change all your passwords, and check the Mail > Preferences > Rules for any scripts that you didn't write. At best, reinstall the OS.

If there is no copy in your Sent box, it's likely that the spammers "spoofed" your email address. It is very easy to falsify the name of the sender. Spammers use any addresses or domains that they can find, and the victim receives the responses. There is nothing you can do about this, but it is not a problem on your computer.

 

[desertman]

Since you are saying that this mail was being sent from one of your email addresses to another of your email addresses I'm wondering whether you really heard the sound of Mail SENDING an email instead of rather hearing the sound of Mail RECEIVING an email.

I think the most likely scenario here is that someone hacked into your (sending) email account and sent an email from there to one of your other email addresses.

What kind of email account was sending (i. e. Gmail), what kind of email address was receiving, and how are these email addresses set up in Mail (POP or IMAP)?

As suggested before, you certainly should change the passwords for both affected email addresses.