E-mail, chat, & VoIP forum: E-mail account compromised. How do I stop the spammers?

Before running off and doing something drastic with your computer or with email accounts, there are several things to do. While everyone here has good suggestions, some are a bit extreme considering the lilelihood of you being the person hacked or having malware is ver low. This does not appear as spam as they are probably not "selling" anything. Spammers don't use these tactics (who would want to buy porn from this method?).

1) First FIND OUT WHAT THE REAL ISSUE IS! Get a copy of the email and search the web or at least the anti-virus sites for the strings used in the email! You will probably find out this is NOT your problem and you don't need to do anything but tell all your friends to quit being cheap and get an anti-malware program!

2) Viruses usually don't bother with Outlook or any email program. They do their own SMTP mailing so do NOT expect anything in a "SENT" folder. It won't be there (unless your kid brother did this as a joke).

3) Don't nother closing email accounts; there are few ways that anyone would bother going into them. Changing passwords is ALWAYS a good idea. You probably have no evidence that anything was done to your email account.

4) Ways you might be able to find out who it is that is infected:

Talk to one of your friends who received the email and has not deleted it yet. In Outlook, have the display the email and then go into options under "view" menu. Go through the Internet headers and trace back to where the email originated. I can almost guarantee that it didn't come from you. If it came from another isp (probably not Yahoo or GMail or Hotmail) you may be able to narrow down from your friends who had the virus. Have them do some scanning.

Try calling all of your friends and see if they are protected.

So: Make sure you have current protection on YOUR computers and scan once in awhile. Change your password. Most of all, do some research on the web to find out what really caused this. If you were spoofed, it is not your fault and it is not your computer and it is NOT you email account. Remember that anyone or any virus can change the "FROM:" address on an email. That's the way TCP/IP is.

1) create a new e-mail address. This will at the least stop current e-mails. hotmail has exceptional spam filters in place/
2) Only send the new e-mail to friends, family, and business you physically patron.
3) create an e-mail address that is for spammers, any forums, any websites that need an e-mail address to register with. this will be used for recreational, and any website that requires e-mail address for verification.
4) if there is a particular reason you need a direct reply from an open forum, use h**p: for websites and use "at hotmail dot com" within profiles for your real address. by making it less computer friendly will bypass the robot spiders.
5) absolutly do not reply to be removed from any mailing list, its a large bell going off that they have an active e-mail account.
6)if a local business spams you, address e-mail to postmaster@ abuse@ include their domain, copy of their spam, with headers. go to their website and find a contact e-mail anything that has sales in it, also at a domain registrar, do a who is, and find the e-mail of the person who registerd their site, and the service that host their online website, which will be listed in whois.

For spam accounts you can let that be, or do a little Domain name lookups by resolving their ip address to a name, then contacting that isp, It gets complicated. this can be a full time job.

Hey all,

Just wanted to post the email that Robert F. sent me thanking you all of our member who contributed to his topic of his compromised email account. Here is his email below:

"Many Thanks

Dear Lee Koo,

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you and all the contributors with suggestions to my hijacked email dilemma. Your readers sent more than 100 possible causes and solutions- predominantly password change. I still get the phishing attempts, but hope, over time, I expect them to disappear.
Thanks again,

Robert F."

Robert, thank you for the email and the feedback. Just so you know Robert, phishing emails will come to your inbox regardless if your email account has been compromised or not, once your email address is used in cyber world, you can pretty much just assume some scammer or spammer out there has it already. It's just a fact of life, and it is up to you be careful and be on guard to not fall victim to one of them.

Safe surfing Robert.

Cheers!
-Lee