How can I tell if I am recieving email spam or one of my friends is messing with me?

[Petreece]

So I got and email and it started out like "Hey 'my name', are you from 'my citys name'? and then the next few posts appeared to be spam because they were just like hi im Jennifer visit this dating site basically. I summarized it a lot but i received two from different email addresses, I think it could be a person because when i responded back the emails weren't instant and took a few hours to get a reply.. also whats really strange is that it was my college email address and i don't understand how they go it. I'm so confused.

[Nick]

You tell by looking at the mail headers to see where the email came from. Sounds like normal spam to me, though.