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Over the last few hours I recieved 4 email replies - all were autoresponders claiming that an email I had "sent" them had failed for various reasons, however my concern was that the replies hinted that my address had sent spam (about Viagara and other usual junk) to these people.



Is this some odd scam or could somebody have actually got hold of my email address?

This is very common and I am suprised you have not had these before now. Spammers harvest email addresses from all sort of places, like forums, mailing lists, Web sites etc. or simply make them up by using common names and domains. All they have to do is send mails out to millions of addresses with a fake 'from' address and they never get any bounced messages like that one. They don't care if the mail is delivered or not and don't want to be traced. The fact that you have read the bounced message means they have delivered their message to you, so their system has worked.

Sadly, you cannot prevent anyone faking your address as the sender. All you can do is delete these bounced mails or set up filters so you don't see them. If you or your ISP has an email gateway (or spam filter) it can catch this stuff before it gets to you but it won't stop it being sent.

If you are interested, there is a great link here showing which networks around the globe are responsible for sending/allowing the most spam through them:
https://nssg.trendmicro.com/nrs/reports/rank.php?page=1

services like hotmail or gmail or any of the big companies will usually not allow simple spoofing to go through unless the sender is logged in to their service.

You can easily fake a 'from' and 'reply-to' address using a normal email client (not Web based), and run your own SMTP service. These people will be using bulk email senders which can fake just about everything in the headers if they want to. Its surprisingly easy to do, which is why there is such a big problem.