Me? A spammer?
By ddaguno
@ddaguno (3107)
Philippines
July 8, 2010 2:56am CST
I have a couple of friend telling me that I am sending them emails which contains a link. I have seen one of these emails and the 'from' portion indicates that it did come from my email.
I have sent no such thing. Do you know who I should contact regarding this? I don't want my friend to think I am a spammer.
1 person likes this
5 responses
@owlwings (43910)
• Cambridge, England
8 Jul 10
It is unlikely that someone has hacked your account. Spammers use software to change the From: field before the mail is sent and very often change it to one of the addresses on the To: list. This makes it appear to have come from your email though it really was not sent by you or by anyone improperly accessing your account.
What they cannot disguise or do anything about is the route that an email takes to reach you. This is recorded in the full header of the email and includes the IP address of the computer that the mail actually originated from. You can look this up (there are many sites for checking IP address locations) and find out the country it was sent from and the name of the Service Provider who provided the Internet connection to that machine. Properly, it is the ISPs responsibility if spam is sent through its network and, once you know their name and website address, you can send a complaint to abuse@... However, this has little effect if the ISP is located in the Eastern Bloc (Ukraine, Russia, &c) or in Asia.
1 person likes this
@bodil4o (271)
• Bulgaria
8 Jul 10
You can't contact anyone.
Install some antivirus programs and start scanning your hard disk.
Do it with as many as you can, alert your friends to tell you if they receive more messages like this and if they still do, you should install more and more antivirus programs (or just replace them), so one of them will catch it and delete it...
If none of the antivirus softwares help the only way is to reinstall your whole windows with recommend format, because if you don't format your hdd it might come back...
@owlwings (43910)
• Cambridge, England
8 Jul 10
Installing a good antivirus and keeping it up to date is never a bad thing but the problem described is exceedingly unlikely to be due to a virus or trojan. It is actually a very common spamming technique (see my response below).
@gunjandubey (512)
• India
8 Jul 10
Just go thoroughly through those emails,what link those emails contains.May be there can be some site that you have joined and those websites(along with tier links) are spamming on your friends mails......have a nice day
@Beautyfactor (1512)
•
8 Jul 10
I had the same thing happen from my hotmail account a while ago. It seems someone has hacked into your account and is using it to send spam like messasges to everyone in your inbox. There are two things you should do ; 1. contact the people who are providing you with your email account and tell them what has happened 2. change your passwords to try and protect yourself.
Hope this helps and you get the problem resolved soon.
@owlwings (43910)
• Cambridge, England
8 Jul 10
It's unlikely that the account is hacked (see my response below) but it never hurts to change your password!
