email account sending spammy mails- help!

Marm0set11

Hi everyone,

I am after some computery advice and hope someone can help. I am not techinally minded so not sure if this description will make sense but here is a quick summary of my problem:

A few weeks ago I received an email from a friend suggesting I check out "world fart academy". Definitely not from her! It had no subject so I had assumed it was a legit email, but it was not.

Last week I had a notification of failure from hotmail for an email I had tried to send to several contacts, including several I haven't spoken to for years. I checked my sent messages and there was no sent message that matched up with this.

Today I have had a few texts from contacts who have received more spammy emails from me, and I definitely haven't sent them. Again, there is no evidence of these messages in my outbox/sent messages folder.

So can anyone enlighten me to what on earth is going on? And if it is possible to stop this?

I hope this makes sense, thanks for reading!

M x

MikeWhitehead

Is this a webmail-based address, or another provider? Do you use an e-mail client such as Outlook or Thunderbird, or purely web-based solutions?

It's easy as pie to spoof the sender of an e-mail. It could be a virus on your system using the address book from your e-mail client to send e-mails, or it could be someone who got hold of your login details etc. Need a bit more information before we can pin it down. Make sure you do some virus/malware scans though.

Browntoa

more likely to be forged email addresses ( yours) that were harvested from your friends infected pc

InsideInsurance

Given you have emails going to associates then someone has somehow gained access to either your address book (if you use one) or email account. If they are just to your friends this is likely, if there are also people you dont know on the list it could be a friends email that has been compromised and they;re spoofing everyone in their inbox/ addressbook

Once they have this they can either trigger your PC to send the emails or alternatively they could have harvested them to a 3rd party computer and that is what is sending the emails out - spoofing an email address is childs play.

The first thing you need to do is ensure you have a good security system on your computer to cover virsus, trojan and spyware. AVG is a reasonable free solution, I personally prefer Kaspersky which is a paid for solution.

Marm0set11

MikeWhitehead wrote: »

Is this a webmail-based address, or another provider? Do you use an e-mail client such as Outlook or Thunderbird, or purely web-based solutions?

It's easy as pie to spoof the sender of an e-mail. It could be a virus on your system using the address book from your e-mail client to send e-mails, or it could be someone who got hold of your login details etc. Need a bit more information before we can pin it down. Make sure you do some virus/malware scans though.

It's a hotmail account that is the cause of the trouble, the email that I think may have started it was also from hotmail. I also use office outlook web access for my uni email.

I have done a scan with virgin media security- is this sufficient or should I get a better security product?

Not sure if anyone would have got hold of my login details as my password isn't written down anywhere and I don't use the same one for anything else, but I shall change it now just to be on the safe side

Thank you very much for your help, I really appreciate it (especially as I am totally useless with this sort of thing).

M x

Marm0set11

Browntoa wrote: »

more likely to be forged email addresses ( yours) that were harvested from your friends infected pc

Does this mean I can't do anything about it?

InsideInsurance wrote: »

Given you have emails going to associates then someone has somehow gained access to either your address book (if you use one) or email account. If they are just to your friends this is likely, if there are also people you dont know on the list it could be a friends email that has been compromised and they;re spoofing everyone in their inbox/ addressbook

Once they have this they can either trigger your PC to send the emails or alternatively they could have harvested them to a 3rd party computer and that is what is sending the emails out - spoofing an email address is childs play.

The first thing you need to do is ensure you have a good security system on your computer to cover virsus, trojan and spyware. AVG is a reasonable free solution, I personally prefer Kaspersky which is a paid for solution.

Ah, that sounds like a good plan. I will have a look into some good security, I currently have the one that comes with virgin media (and my dad warned me wouldn't be good enough ).

Is it possible to totally delete my email account if I can't stop it sending the emails? I mean rather than just stop using it, if that makes any sense. It will probably be a bit of a pain, but I'd rather that than keep irritating everyone I know!


Sorry I am so hopeless with this, and thank you all for taking the time to help me

M

MikeWhitehead

If you try changing your password and security question/secondary (backup) email address associated with the account, that will pretty much be the best you can do from the mail side of things. Deleting the account wouldn't make a difference as the e-mail won't be getting sent directly from your account (if it is an address book harvest), it will be sent via spoofing your address - they'd still be getting sent out.

I suggest using Malware Bytes and Avast Free to scan for any infections that may be causing it. Do you know how often the e-mails are being sent out? A copy of the e-mail headers would be useful to check the source of the e-mail, but I wouldn't suggest posting the headers directly to the forum - PM if you like and I can have a bit of a closer look. Also, are any of the e-mails being sent via your uni e-mail or purely your Hotmail account?