Yup
When I get those emails that are from a hacked email account I always make a point to contact the person ASAP. They have no way of knowing that their email is compromised.
When my email was hacked once, the only way I found out was that I have myself as a contact and the spammers sent me an email also. that was my first indication of a problem. In my case the hacker were not so nice, as soon as they were finished sending spam to all of my contacts, they deleted the contents of all folders including sent mail, received mail and even deleted all of my contacts. Fortunately I do back up my contacts. Everyone does back up their computer stuff right.
It is the free emails like Yahoo, Hotmail, G mail etc that the spammers attack. They find a real email address and then have a computer try to log into that account, the computer just keeps trying passwords till it gets one that hits. At that point they are into you email account and can then copy all of your contacts to use as new seeds to exploit and also send out their spam from your account, so that the junk mail actually really did come from you. There is nothing you can do to stop this activity. They will continue to use your account till you log in and change the password, blocking them till they have their computer figure out the new password. The more characters in your password, the longer it will take them to hit it.