Seeing more spam in your inbox? Gmail may be at fault

This weekend, users who used Google’s email service suddenly found that their inboxes were flooded with spam mail.

To make things even more bizarre,  the users also found that the emails appeared to originate from….themselves?

Several users complained on Google’s help forums, noting that they were receiving spam emails like weight loss, and even after changing their password and having 2FA enabled, or even despite that, the e-mails would continue.

In a statement, Google said to Mashable:

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. If you happen to notice a suspicious email, we encourage you to report it as spam. More information on how to report spam can be found by visiting our Help Center.

Somehow, the users were able to trick both Google’s spam filter and mess with Gmail enough that Gmail added their photos to the sent folder, being unable to tell that it itself did not send the email.

As of the time of writing, Google is working to resolve this on their end. If you’re beset by self-generated spam email, perhaps you ought to try an email service with a brighter Outlook.