Wife stressing about spam emails from her account

NotTheStig

NotTheStig

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She has had a number of auto-replies from email addresses in her BT Yahoo account. She is worried that her password must have been compromised for the spam bit or whatever it is to have those contacts. She's changed her password but what is likely to have happened in these kinds of situations and should she be stressing about it?
 
It's not likely that her account has been hacked. By far the most common cause of those types of mails is that someone has picked up on her email address online and is now sending emails from elsewhere but specifying her as the sender. It adds a look of authenticity to the mails but doesn't add much else.

Well worth running a virus check, but probably nothing to be overly concerned about.
 
Something similar happened when I had a hotmail account, if I'm reading it right... all of a sudden I got locked out of my account due to suspicious activity and once I reset it I had about 30 sent items selling boner pills or something.

No harm done to my computer but the account was certainly compromised, I'm not daft enough to fall for phishing so I'm not sure how they got in. I believe Yahoo and Hotmail are very bad for it. I scanned for viruses and keyloggers but it was clean, I've been with Gmail for a few years now and had no problem.
 
same problem here, hotmail account for me. All the contacts in my list kept getting emails that looked like I had sent them, usually to do with sex aids etc. I ended up deleting all my contacts and that stopped it but it's meant I don't save anyones email addresses on my account.
 
'Boner Pills', chuckle, chuckle. You've got a lovely command of the English language, Canuck! With my old BTinternet Yahoo email account, I got loads of spam from the usual nefarious sources with their lovely subjects. Since going Gmail (Gairdnermail ;)), I've only had the very odd junk message and no 'boner pills'. Sounds like a dodgy new German beer. Boner Pils - Keeps you up all night!
 
Walkers said:
same problem here, hotmail account for me. All the contacts in my list kept getting emails that looked like I had sent them, usually to do with sex aids etc. I ended up deleting all my contacts and that stopped it but it's meant I don't save anyones email addresses on my account.
Click to expand...

Exactly the same problem... and exactly the same solution. Bit of a pain not having any saved contacts, though.

All hotmail accounts are going over to Outlook soon (whether you like it or not). Don't know if that will help, but you do have the option to keep your hotmail address.
 
Your far better going with a different email company like gmail. Far more robust and practical hotmail is quite old and outdated now. Even if they are revamping it.
 
Be worth checking for Trojan Horses as well. A free copy of Malwarebytes will tell you if her machine has been hijacked by spammers, rather than just the email account (which is the most common/probable). As I understand it, mobile phones are the usual route in for hijackers.
 
Not in this case: This is pure sloppiness on the part of Yahoo -> http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/01/how-yahoo-allowed-hackers-to-hijack-my-neighbors-e-mail-account/

They're not alone... as this confirms - http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/10/22/how-hotmail-security-compared-gmail-yahoo/
 
I had a similar problem twice with BT Yahoo mail a couple of years ago. Tried getting BT to sort the problem out, what a waste of time they were. On the advice of a friend who works in IT I changed to GMail, apparently GMail is more secure than both Yahoo and Hotmail. Since changing I've had no problems. I also know of others who have experienced similar problems, again they also changed from Yahoo and as far as I'm aware they have also been fine since.

Best of luck
 
She is worried about damage already done. I'm not sure what commercial value can be placed on knowing about Auntie Aida's piles, beyond targeted pile cream advertising obviously.
Hopefully nothing more nefarious than that will come of it all
 
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