My email address seems to be hijacked!

geek84

Hi Folks

It seems as if my email address has been hijacked.

I have received a lot of spam emails and other strange emails i.e. not 'normal' emails. How can I rectify the problem? Would it be sufficient if I change my email address password?

Thanks in advance.

victor2

Have you received unwanted emails or does it appear that you are sending them?
If you are receiving them, then your address has somehow got onto a spammers list and there's little you can do other than block them as much as you can with an anti-spam filter.
If it appears your account is being used to send spam from an online email account, such as a hotmail address, then check if there are messages in your sent items folder. Changing your password should help if that is the case.
If it is malware on your PC sending email through your email client, such as Outlook, then they will again probably be in your sent items. If that is the case, changing your password won't help, but scanning for malware with something like malwarebytes could find the problem.

dippy-cat

I'm having this problem too, the emails don't appear in my sent box, Norton hasn't found anything, currently scanning with malwarebytes, anything else I should do. My ISP is AOL and I have changed my password.

Thank you

altojack

ME too, I'm with Orange fs mail and am getting loads of 'unwanted' and inappropriate stuff.
As a female over a 'certain' age I am not interested in Viagra or boob jobs etc lol

RussJK

Merely receiving emails just usually means that
a) spammers have gotten a hold of your email address
AND
b) you need a better email provider or some kind of anti-spam

A good anti-spam program is Mailwasher (http://www.mailwasher.net/), which rejects spam as though your address doesn't exist - that way your address may eventually be marked by spammers as not a valid email address. It seems to even work with web-based mail that allow connections to the mail server itself.

I moved to fastmail years ago and it's not an issue for me. Others say the same of gmail, if you're happy letting Google have access to your emails. Doesn't hurt to do some malware checks with Malwarebytes, HitmanPro, etc, but even if you find anything the two might not necessarily be related.

asbokid

The email provider can choose to run mail filtering software to counter spam. The software, such as spamassassin, uses heuristic techniques to filter junk out of your main mailbox and into a suspected spam folder.

There is an administrative cost and a performance overhead in running spam filtering software. Crappy operators like Microsoft and Orange may be cutting corners and disabling these features to save money.

easyhost

well this happens all the times.

i am amazed at the amount of times i send myself emails selling myself certain tablets for men. check the full headers and the IPS nearly always originate from China.

david39

If you only have a few contacts then it might be preferable to create a new email address and advise it to the people who need to know.

Most ISPs allow more than one email address so, if your existing address is with your provider, check on their help page to find out how to create another.

If you are using a web-based email client such as hotmail or gmail then just apply again using a different log-in name and password.

There's no need to do anything with the old address. If you don't use it for some time it will get deleted.

You can notify all your contacts with a single email by grouping them all into the To: box of a new email - that way you only send it once.

Just one thing - remember that some commercial companies may have your email address quite legitimately because you want them to have it, so you will have to tell them too if you want to continue receiving from them.

A good way to avoid spam in the first place is to keep your trusted contacts on one email account and then create another account that you use for sending emails to commercial companies and anyone else you don't really know. This way the spam, if you get any, only clogs up one account and you can just dump that and start a new one again if it becomes unmanageable.

easyhost

how i do it is that i have my ISP email address and my business email addresses, but if i sign up to anything online or of anyone asked for my email that i do not fully trust i give them my yahoo email address, so any spam goes to my yahoo address and does not effect my main emails and they i just go in and dump them on a regular basis

RussJK

easyhost wrote: »

how i do it is that i have my ISP email address and my business email addresses, but if i sign up to anything online or of anyone asked for my email that i do not fully trust i give them my yahoo email address, so any spam goes to my yahoo address and does not effect my main emails and they i just go in and dump them on a regular basis

I do something similar with Fastmail. It lets you set up 'aliases' or separate email addresses that can be deleted. This way, if one gets heavily spammed you can just delete it. All are accessed by the one real email address, which you never give out.

I set it up years ago with one for friends, one professional email, one for untrusted contacts, one for internet shopping, etc - and haven't had to delete any of them as the spam filtering is so good.

altojack

Thanks for all the help with this problem. I will definately move away from Orange as they aren't my provider and haven't been for a few years.
My Yahoo account is clear of spam so will keep that and open a new account for business emails.
Once again thanks for all the help