Gmail Users: Unwitting Google Talk Spammers?

I use Google. I use Gmail. I use Froogle. I use Google Images. I use Google’s homepage thingy (which doesn’t seem to have a name). I use Google Talk. Overall, I love the Google, but somehow the Gmail + Google Talk combo has left me with a bad taste in my mouth over the past couple of days. Allow me to explain…

Apparently, I have been spamming contacts from Gmail to start using Google Talk. It’s not that I wouldn’t recommend Google Talk, but somehow friends of mine are receiving fake emails from my Gmail account trumpeting the greatness of Google Talk. Here’s the message that I supposedly sent to my friend Jaime:

Hey Jaime, this is the fakest message you ever got. I use Google Talk.
You should too.

That seems like something that I might write, if I was going to suggest Google Talk. I’ll admit, I will email people while blindly drunk, so I thought that maybe I actually wrote that message. But then here’s the message I supposedly sent my friend Justine:

hey j.
I dunno why you’re still old schoolin’ with the msn, but the cool kids are over on gmail. I have a million invites, and I’m givin them out left and right (but not tonight—elp!! I”m being tortured! My punctuation points are being1!*%#^&)

There is no way in hell that I would write that shit. I only found out about this whole thing by chatting with Justine last week, and she randomly mentioned that she downloaded Google Talk after my last email message on said topic. I had no idea what she was talking about, so I dismissed it at the time, but this morning I was doing some serious Gmail message sorting and came across this supposed missive IN MY SENT MAIL! Google is inviting people to Google Talk on my behalf, pretending to be me, and is giving me the luxury of perusing the fake emails that I’ve sent.

I don’t know what the hell is going on here. This is so un-Google. If anyone has any information on this practice, I’d love to hear it. This is a wonderful example of the type of unauthorized access that the Gmail Privacy Policy says they’re protecting us against.

Edit: I cannot prove or disprove anything that I mention in the text above. As you’ll see in the comments below, I cannot prove that this is a real issue. I think it is, but that does not matter. Readers will notice that I added a ? to the end of the original article.