An evil spammer has hacked my email account and has sent advertising messages to everyone on my email list.
Sorry about this. I woke to over 80 messages in my own spambox. Please ignore until I figure out what to do about it. Hate to lose an email address I've been using for ten years.
Suggestions?
HJW
~
Changing your password is NOT sufficient, even though that is Yahoo's advice! Use a very strong password (letters, capitals, punctuation, symbols - the longer the better.)
ReplyDeleteChange your 'Secret' Questions and Answers - ones that nobody could guess - Yahoo even allows you to invent your own questions.
Change all your alternate e-mail addresses too. Yahoo sends the change of password to the alternate e-mail, so if you change that (or those) too, the hacker will not be able to re-set your password.
Password + Secrets + Alternate Address = better security
Cheers!
They may not have stolen your email account.
ReplyDeleteThe implementation of security in the electronic mail standard is ridiculously weak. Whenever anyone sends an email, the server that gets the mail asks "what is your email address?" They can put anything in there that they want. The receiving email computer has the burden of responsibility to determine if the sender's address is valid: this is hard to do.
No one needs to hack your email password to do this. They just need to use your email address. They can use whatever email address they want, and they used yours. Typically spammers will use an address for a short time period and then abandon it.
What I would do is not abandon your beloved identity; rather, send an email to the security folks at yahoo telling them your trouble (for you, this would be abuse@yahoo.com or whatever the letters after the dot are.) The security administrators then will track down where the email was actually sent from and work on it from there.
Alternatively, there are some computer viruses which will infect your computer and mess with email from there, but since you have a Mac if i recall, this is much less of a problem. Chances are they just used your email as described above.
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ReplyDeleteOK, I re-read your posting. You are getting messages sent to your email list.
ReplyDeleteSend an abuse complaint message to your email company, let them know what is happening. Change your email password. They will likely tell you what you have to do next.
The onus is not on you, because this could be done to anyone. People should use common sense and computer hygiene with e-mail, even if apparently from a known party. The e-mail consisted of a link to an unknown website, nothing more, so it was obviously not from you. Best to use an e-mail viewer that only views plain text, does not view attachments automatically, does not reach into links.
ReplyDeleteHilary, please check your listed email address for a donation.
ReplyDelete"friend"
ReplyDeleteplease check the above post as to why that's a bad idea.
Also, check out the commbox rules posted to the sidebar about why we don't allow anonymous or pseudonymous comments.