I received an email from my cousin she says she didn't send?

Does anyone have an explanation for this. My cousin has a hotmail account and according to her she has McAfee as her firewall/virus protection etc. Today I received an email from her, it was also sent to pretty much everyone in her address book. It was an email introducing a wholesale electronics website and saying look into these prices etc. contact me to help you and so on. Anyway I clicked it and it's a website for electronics as it said. I really believed it was from my cousin as she is always into some business or another making money in different areas. Anyway when I called her, she insists that she knows nothing about this and she's been out of town for the past 2 days and hasn't even been on her computer. Now I automatically thought I was being sent some type of virus but nothing seems wrong with my computer or hers. Does anyone recognize this type of situation. Could it just be a fluke. It comes from her email adress though. Any ideas from experts would be appreciated.

Thank you all very much. I appreciate the feedback. First thing I'll do is run an antivirus.

If her antivirus is up to date, then someone has picked up both email addresses and sending items out as spam. It is fairly easy to send an email with someone else's address to make it look like it came from someone you know. It helps to get by spam filters that most ISPs have in place. Addresses can be picked up from messages where folks to alot of forwarding or replying to all in emails.

My brother-in-law has "sent" me messages while visiting me in town and he hasn't been on his computer for days or even have it turned on.

ATT/Yahoo has a nice feature to create "dumby" email addresses linked to your account. When you start getting a bunch of spam on that address, you can just turn it off.

As a precaution, I would make sure both computers antivirus is up to date and then have do a complete scan just to be on the safe side.

yes, either she has a virus or someone hacked into her hotmail account.

run antivirus and spyware dectors, although you will probably find nothin....your cousin probably had his/her e-mail hacked and this is how the e-mail was sent to you...recommend to your cousin that he/she change his/her password

u ask too many stupid questions

This is typical worm behavior. Your address book has been compromised. If your cousin has a working antivirus package, its signatures must not be up to date or it must not be configured correctly.

You are probably infected, too. You need a good, modern antivirus package. I happen to like Defender Pro but to be honest, the big names are all pretty decent in what they do.