help somone seems to have send an enormous amount of fake emails to all my contacts

jamespir

basically logged in and ive got postmaster failure from hotmail and and it seems that somone sent everyone an email advertising ipods and uggs from my email address how is this possible i havent revealed my apss word to anyone and i dont even open the junk mail folder

ive also had replies from some companies sayiing theyve recieved this email and arent very happy

996ducati

Sounds like you've picked up a Virus or Trojan?

Anti Virus up to date?

Tried a full anti virus scan?

Might be worth using one of the free online scanners and reporting back the results.

http://www.pandasecurity.com/homeusers/solutions/activescan/

or

http://www.eset.com/onlinescan/scanner.php?i_agree=14

John_Gray

Run Malwarebytes' Anti-malware (just do a search on this forum for what to do). And possibly SUPERAntiSpyware, just for reassurance.

Then change your email address ASAP, and tell all your real contacts the new address.

Somehow your email address has been compromised, and so spam emails may continue to be sent out in your name...

wonka

2 possibilities here....
Either you have a virus on your PC, and it has compromised your email client (e.g. Outlook Express). Or... you are one of the many who have had their Hotmail accounts hacked into.

If it's the former, I would follow the advice of previous posters. If the latter, change your hotmail password, preferably to one that is a lot stronger - see here for some useful guidelines.

DatabaseError

if you don't know the companies/people who've replied, then it's likely not your machine at fault, someone's just using your email address on their own spam, which is dead easy
Obviously check for malware as suggested above, and changing your e-mail password can't do any harm, but don't worry too much.
for this reason I NEVER publish my e-mail address online (a hotmail address from before MS bought the company ), and I'm careful which e-mail I use for which signup, some I just use disposable addresses as I don't care what happens with those

duchy

It may NOT be a virus -my hotmail account was hacked into a few months ago and emails advertising electrical goods were sent out to all my contacts. Check your sent mail folder for this first.

Change your email password -then run a full security scan and see if it shows anything up.

davb

There were a lot of Hotmail accounts compromised a couple of months ago:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8291268.stm
I think it is still under debate if this was a Phishing attack or a MS problem.

Change your password and secret question ASAP.

jamespir

its hotmail account ive changed the password ran a scan and all was fine on the comp bar a little bit of adware