You may receive spam email or "splatter" that is "FROM" your own email address, or "FROM" an email address in your domain name.

Splatter is the industry term for undeliverable email notices you receive when a spammer uses your email address to send out spam.

These emails were most likely not sent from yourself or from the person indicated. 
 

When you send an email, you can send it "FROM" any person or email address you want. It does not have to be from you. Internet email servers have no way of determining if a message is actually sent from the person or address indicated by the "FROM" information included in the email.

You can see this for yourself if you look at the email account settings in your email program. It allows you to set the FROM information, including your name, email address and a reply-to email address.

Spammers take advantage of this weakness with Internet email.

1. They want their spam email sent "FROM" a valid email address, so spam filters cannot easily recognize junk emails.
    
2. They do not want your spam filters blocking their junk mail, so they send the message "FROM" an email address you can not simply "block".

The first layer of defense are spam filters, which can flag or filter out many of these messages before they reach your mail box

After spam filters, you can set a rule in your mail program to route email sent from your own email address to your junk mail folder. You will need to remember to drag messages out to your inbox if you (1) send yourself an email, or (2) include yourself on the distribution list of an email you send.

If you send yourselves emails regularly, to "file" information in your mail program, you can complicate the rule by adding a pass phrase to the subject line so your own emails are not filtered out.

In some cases, SPF records are a good defense. SPF records require that any email sent "FROM" your domain name be sent from specific IP Numbers. SPF records are set at the domain name level, and can not be set for individual users.

With SPF records, everyone must be using your domain name email from a specific location, or from a very limited number of locations. If you have people using your email system from a variety of geographic locations and/or a variety of Internet Access Providers, SPF records will not work for you. SPF records have many limitations and are not widely used.