Has my email been hacked to send spam?
Posted on 08. Dec, 2008 by Mike Halsey in security
Are you getting undeliverable email messages from people you’ve not sent email to? I’ve had this a couple of times from the email address I used during self-employment. This resulted in receiving thousands of messages in a period of a few weeks. The thing is, none of them were sent from my email account. I was spoofed!
What does this mean? This means that someone is sending email pretending that it’s from you. You’d be surprised just how easy this is to do, you could send an email now that looked like it was from your ex if you wanted, not that I’m about to tell you how to do it. 
Unfortunately there’s absolutely nothing you can do about spoofing other than create a spam rule to auto-delete all the undeliverable mail messages, and wait. They normally stop in about three weeks, but a year or two down the line and you might suffer from it again.
But what if the sent emails are actually appearing in your sent box? In this case somebody has deliberately hacked your email account. There are two things you should do, and you should do them immediately. Firstly, you should change the password on your email account. Without the password they can’t get in, for more information on how to create a strong password see my article on the subject.
The next thing you should do is email abuse@ your email provider and inform them that your email account has been hacked. They can investigate this and perhaps track the perpetrators. In the mean time, changing your password will keep them out and a strong password will help make sure it doesn’t happen again.
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