hotmail account being used to spam contacts

dichapman

My hotmail account keeps being used every few weeks to spam my contacts. I have run virus stuff and spyware but it is still happening. Other than change my email address what can i do to stop it?

davester

have you changed your password in Hotmail? Have you changed the secret question answer?, Have you been clicking links from emails or messages that require you to loginto a seemingly hotmail looking site. The who blocked me scam and types are all over the place.

when you loggin do you see these said spam mails in your sent box?

googler

Change your password for a start...

thepurplegoldfish

I've had a Hotmail account for well over 10 years... Spammer's love hotmail. Best thing I ever did was move to Gmail, been with Gmail 2 years, no issues.

davester

I had a hotmail for over 10 yrs and i get spam but i not get used as a spammer. I get spam in my Gmail as well. I think its more of be sensible with what you click on when online ,even links from friends and links in MSN.

dichapman

Will change my password. i dont see them as sent, but i do see postmaster delivery failures as there are some out of date addresses in my address book that i just havent deleted

macman

Sounds like your address is being spoofed then if they are not in Sent.

davester

Yeah what Macman said. I always wondered though how they get your contacts list if they just spoof your address?

macman

Possible that they have both spoofed your address and hacked your account to harvest the contacts?
Change the password and see what happens.

tronator

davester wrote: »

Yeah what Macman said. I always wondered though how they get your contacts list if they just spoof your address?

That's easy to explain. Someone who has you in his address book is very likely to have a lot of your contacts in his address book too. Or in other words, your friends know each other too.

The spam bot just picks one of the addresses as sender and sends the emails to everyone else. This time it happens to be your address. Next time you might get emails from a "friend"...

mandragora_2

One thing I found was that my hotmail account was corrupted through the 'automated vacation replies' option - once I found it and returned it to the usual 'off' setting, the problem stopped. I have no idea how they devils got in there in the first place, but it's been sorted and stopped for 18 months now. HTH