Spam emails being sent from your email address

[Aussie Willy]

Woke up this morning to discover 28 Delivery Fail Notification emails in my inbox. It looks like someone has used my email to send spam but all the notifications that they were rejected have come back to me.

I know I didn't send them out but am concerned about this. I have sent all the emails to my ISP to ask them to investigate.

Has anyone had this happen to them? If so what did you do about it?

Bit scary to see this. And I am concerned that my email will now get put on a target list.

 

[Jot the Dot Dot]

I had that happen a few times. Some links to gay porn allegedly coming from me, and a sister-in-law responding "Jerry, I don't know why you think I would want this". Had to explain to her that my addy might have been compromised, and someone use that as a point of origin. I think the culprit was nicknamed the "e-mail pest", as it happened on a few message boards as well, bunch of members receiving spam allegedly from recipient X. Try changing your password from (previous) to (new one), whatever. No panacea, but worth a try.

 

[Aussie Willy]

Contacted my ISP. They have changed my password and put a temporary block on it. But how annoying. At least it wasn't rude stuff being sent. Just asking for pictures and job offers.

 

[judiz]

Happened to me a few years ago, I changed my password and it seemed to work

 

[Susan1]

Not the same thing, but I just got an email FROM my email address. The subject line is in German! Sheesh. Didn't open it.

 

[Prancer]

The first thing to do is check your Sent Items. If your account is sending out emails, then those emails will show up there.

Chances are, your account is NOT sending out emails; someone is spoofing your email address.

In that case, you haven't been hacked and your account is secure; it isn't necessary to change your password, although it's probably a good idea to do so if you haven't in a while. But it isn't likely to stop the spoofing because your account isn't actually being used.

You usually just have to wait this out.

 

[Tesla]

Thank you, @Prancer! I didn't know about email spoofing. I think my husband has been a victim of that. I'm glad it wasn't a hack.

 

[Aussie Willy]

Actually it is quite easy to set up various email address in Outlook that belong to other people as long as you have the password. Discovered it recently when I was helping my friend who had separated from his wife to sort out his email. Got the email addresses set up but then she saw me doing test emails from my computer to his because they were going into the email address that she still had access to and she hadn't changed the password. She ended up absolutely cracking the shits with me because she thought I was on his side even though I was just helping him.

So if you change the password it will stop them because they then can't use your email account any more.

 

[Prancer]

IF you have the password--which is highly unlikely. Why take the time and effort to crack a password if there is no reason to do so?

That's why spoofing is way more common than hacking--it doesn't require any effort and gets the job done.

 

[Cachoo]

There is news here locally in some small town where one of the county administrators received an e-mail from his boss instructing him to wire $48,000 to an account in Georgia. And so he did though the administrator never emailed him. It is a scam that is occuring all of the time apparently and now that money is gone.

Treasurer'sOffice falls foremail scam

 

[Susan1]

Just FYI - I'm still getting 7-8 spam emails a day in GERMAN!!!!! What the heck? I just delete them, but weird.