Help needed: Spam being sent with my hotmail e-mail address
 

Hi guys. Someone is sending out spam mimicking my hotmail account address. Anyone know of anything I can do about that? I've sent a note to my contacts telling them to delete anything they receive from that account (it is used solely for when I have to give my e-mail address when signing up for a forum or a utility, etc. - anything that might get me on a spamming list). What else can I do? Would deleting the contacts list help? (I don't know if the account has been compromised or if someone is just mimicking my address.)

I had the same issue with someone spamming smoke signals from my campfire.

Ok, you had to know someone was going to make a comment in regards to hotmail being old.. :)

Did someone possibly hack your email addy and is it only going out to your contacts only? (Looks like a quick search has some threads on malware being the culprit on hijacked hotmail accounts)

I had a thread recently where this happened to my wife's gmail account - simply changing the PW solved the problem.

Are any of the emails going out still in your Sent Items folder? If not, then they are probably just spoofing your address. If you can get a copy of one of the emails that was sent out with your email address, there is info in the headers that can determine where the message originated.

Yeah, they are still in the Sent folder.

Wade - I will change the password. Good idea!

Could be worse. Could be AOL. :)

Like I said, it's an old account that evolved into my possible spam source account.

Is there somewhere I could send that info to report it?

How did they gain access to the account? That's kind of scary.

Spoof's one thing(what Cartman said), actually having them in your sent items is something else altogether. Header information won't be any different than normal.

I think the only information available is IP logs at Microsoft. Does Hotmail have a support email address? I'd be amazed if MS did anything.

Yeah, it is a bit scary. No idea how they got access.

Just changed every password under the sun. Hopefully that limits possible downsides.

Make sure to have strong passwords, that's all I would guess.

Password Recovery Speeds

So '3lit3' isn't gonna take long to crack? ;)

Heh.

Well the idea is either the account will lock or there is some sort of captcha protection. I would hope Hotmail(and pretty much every system) uses one of those two. So it doesn't matter how many attempts you can do in a second, you get 5.

Most complexity requirements out there aren't needed and are just a needless PITA. What is needed is maximum password age. Simply to protect people against more conventional attacks, someone glancing over your shoulder, giving it out to someone you trusted and it leaks out somehow, etc.

Anyways, off topic, but that's my opinion piece :D.

I hate maximum password age. THAT is a huge pain in the ass.

I had this problem a few months ago. I tried to send an email from my Hotmail account and got some message that I had already sent my alotted number of emails in a day or something. I checked my sent mails and, sure enough, someone had spammed from my acount.

No clue how it happened. I changed my password and it hasn't happened since.

That it may be, but at least it has a purpose. Especially with all the idiots out there that flaunt their password around.

I 100% don't understand the point of some of the more stringent complexity requirements.