Rogue Emails

[Jack Peterson]

:angry: I am no Technophobe and at 64 I have no intention of even trying to be. self taught after the initial introduction and doing what it says on the tin is about all the expertise i have. Tonight I had an email from Yahoo, telling me that my account was being be accessed from an unknown source and unknown equipment in Mexico, it gave me the isp numbers and asked me to check to see if it was indeed someone I knew. well I don't and I don't really understand what it was all about. A little later I had a curt mail from a friend in Dumaguete, he said JACK! please stop sending me mail about this and that, I had not. So I went back to the yahoo mail and found that whatever or who ever had been sending Rouge mail out from my account seems some of these mails went out before the chaps or equipment at least at Yahoo, stopped it all and just shut me down I followed all the things they said to do, Change this and change that, took me over an Hours to do all that was suggested, to get some security back in to the account. I don't use Yahoo much as a mail service but seems this is probably the cause. well I don't know if this true but something or some one, has attacked my address book and sent out this Bogus stuff. How can this happen, if we have a supposedly good anti Virus programme with all the mod cons of anti this and anti that, Phishing protection email protection (I use Avast) I was informed it is best to change you AVP every now and then This I don't know about but I took the advice I have over the last 8 years had Norton, McAfee you name it I have tried it, can some one enlighten me how these happen, Maybe I have just led a sheltered Life of trust. This tonight, got me a little riled, as the Guy concerned is a damn good friend. his words were it could have been full of Virus, I guess he opened it.

Something I don't do, unless I am practically 100% sure of the sender as I guess he was well thought he was. Now I have the Yahoo seal of approval or something like that, apparently now, all my contacts will get an Image and if the image and colour banding are not there it is Bogus.

has anyone else had this sort of thing happen

Iam sure I will not be the only one.

Jack P. :tiphat:

[MikeB]

It's called spoofing, a spammer hijacked your email address and sent spam to all your email client (probably Outlook) contacts. I was an email administrator, it's very common and there's not much you can do at this point, short of discarding the address. It usually slows down and stops on it's own. There are a lot of articles on this, here's one:

http://www.pcworld.c...l_spoofing.html

[billten]

Jack, I used to be a Windows guy and fought the good fight against viruses and spyware and such until i got sick of it. I switched to Ubuntu (on open source, free Linux o/s) and in the 4 years since the switch i have not even had anti virus software loaded on my PC. In that 4 years i have also supported PC's used by 2 of my kids and my 80 years old Dad (who is still in the UK so all my help was over the phone) and they have never managed to pick up any malware either. Even if its just to use as a computer for the internet and e-mail, considering having a system that dual boots Windows / Ubuntu may be worth your while. It doesn't cost anything and works great.

BTW, one last thing; a few months back the systems that the US Army use to drive their drone planes got infected with some virous that they thought may be an attempt to hijack the drone by a foreign power. What did they do? Install some massive expensive and complex anti-virus software, elaborate firewalls, some other star wars crap? Nope, they switched to Linux. problem solved ;-)

When i did the switch it did take me a couple of hours to 'get it', that is understand enough about the way the o/s worked to get around and do all the things i needed to do. This time was shortened enormously by a friend taking me on a guided tour of my new Ubuntu system. If anyone on this forum is thinking of making the switch, i would be happy to pay on his kindness in getting me going and give the same tour to them.

Edited June 10, 2012 by billten

[Call me bubba]

YAHOO - a free email. problems with it. humm

have you ever considered another EMAIL service?

or have a YAHOO for just your "friends"

and then another YAHOO for enrollment .other services

[Mike S]

Hey Jack .... you ain't alone happened to me on MSN a few months back and I have had an account with them for centuries ..... I re-invented my password to something outlandish and have had no problem sense ..... by the way I have 4 or more email accounts with as many different applications ..... on a good day I get some 50-100 junk mails in my Yahoo account which I delete without opening them .... yup emails can be a pain-in-the-a*s but are a necessity .....

Lunix is good I suppose I tried Lindows once years ago but found it to be very limited in the types of programs I want to use and the games I wanted to play besides I have no wish to learn a new OS all over again ..... and like Jack said .... something about an ol' dog and new tricks ...... :hystery: :hystery: :hystery:

[MikeB]

Unfortunately, this can happen on any OS and email client. They are using your email address in the From field. Every time you use your address on a web site you are exposed.

[Jollygoodfellow]

Unfortunately, this can happen on any OS and email client. They are using your email address in the From field. Every time you use your address on a web site you are exposed.

Yes and its not uncommon. Just the other week I got an Email from a member here, it had one line of crap and a link, I know he did not send it to me so his account must of been hacked. Months ago i startled getting Emails from the wife's Email address that were not from her.

The best thing to do is delete the account but its hard if using the same address for years, these days almost everything on line is attached to your Email address like accounts for this and that.

[Jack Peterson]

YAHOO - a free email. problems with it. humm

have you ever considered another EMAIL service?

or have a YAHOO for just your "friends"

and then another YAHOO for enrollment .other services

Well, I have various mail addresses for the things I do. Yahoo, I keep mainly for friends but do not use it that much at all. Most are now on Gmail or Msn. Mike B sent me a link on Spoofing, that is well worth a read BTW Thank you Mike. this explained a lot to me, However, I am glad to hear that it is not only me, I did not think it would be.On this occasion Yahoo have kept their word. Halted the account, until I was contacted and changed a few this around, maybe I should have been a little more on top of things and changed some things. I Am now on a 2 week sign in programme. Then if necessary change things again. Like most Guys of my age, I need to be reminded of things I have to do, I guess this is true, what I Had heard, a dormant Address can be a target I don't seem to have any problem with Hotmail, Live, or Gmail, these I use every day. I will be keeping an eye on Ymail from now on. it seems Yahoo though, have this covered though :541: so 10 marks to them.

Thank you all for the Replies, I am sure I will never really understand all this technology but at least I am 1step, nearer now :)

[Mike S]

Talk about a real shocker I got an email yesterday from an old girlfriend that has been dead for 2 years ...... her girlfriend sent me her obituary right after she died ...... she had met another guy and went to the states where they got married ..... sadly she only lived a couple of years after that ..... she had cancer ..... but it did make me stop and think when I got an email supposedly from her so I guess her old email address is still floating around out there in cyber space ..... geeeeez I wonder how many times that happens as most people can't cancel their email address because they are dead ......

[i am bob]

I once got an email from my grandmother who had passed away on New Years Day 1981 and had never even heard of a computer or email at the time of her passing... (Gee, I wonder why?) The email came to me in 2005 and had her full name (and mine) and was asking me for $10,000 to help her pay off her mortgage (which I knew had been paid off when I was 7 years old)... I did a little work on that one and got a guy put away for a couple years... A former client of mine got something similar - asking for money to pay off a bill... the only problem was that it was sent by "him" and from his own personal email.... hehe!!! We caught that one too!

:mocking:

Bottom line - there are so many scammers and other ways out there to separate you from your money - sometimes they actually work! So always be careful, change passwords often, use a second brand anti-virus at least once a week, don't open emails you don't know or sound funny, and just send me your $100 now...