Well I just opened an email that has me e-spooked.

[CloudWatcher]

5. My experience with "hacked email"

Just fyi, about 100% of the fake email that I've gotten from my friends has been forged. I.e. my friends' email system was not hacked, but their contact list was acquired(*). So the spammers would just generate fake email from one of them to all of their friends.

Sadly faking email is very easy to do (almost as easy as spoofing caller-id), and looking at the raw email headers to deduce if it's a forgery is a technical skill that's not super easy to teach.

(*) This is one big reason I hate sharing my contact list (address book) with services like Skype or WhatsApp.