My hotmail is sending out spam

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I just found out today my email address is sending out spam. Today I found an email in my inbox telling me he or she isn't my friend and never will be and to stop sending it spam and called me a nasty name. Then it said don't bother replying because he or she has my address blocked. I was confused and didn't know who this person was and I don't even use my hotmail account much. I check it maybe once a week or every two weeks.

I post about it on another forum and someone else on my contact list who happens to be a member there told me he gets spam from my email too and he just deletes it. Now I know my email has been sending out spam which is typical on MSN because I get tons of spam too and I have blocked contacts on my MSN list because they were sending me spam. I knew it wasn't them as a person but their email address was hacked.

Does anyone know how to fix this so your email will stop sending out spam?

change your password.

I get spam messages from hotmail contacts frequently. I assume it goes around by clicking links and that if you click the link the links get sent out to more people and they click the links...

Sounds like you may have a malware problem that is hijacking your email or somebody else may have access to your account. Pretty serious either way.

http://ask-leo.com/someones_sending_ema ... _i_do.html

Hope you don't have any important information saved in your email account(like passwords to other sites, financial info, etc), if so, you'd have to consider all of it compromised. Malware would be on your system somewhere but those usually don't target web-based email(but I suppose it's possible), but it could be that someone got access and is spoofing everyone in your contacts. You could try what's suggested in the article above by changing all your info, but I'd probably try to contact someone at Hotmail too to see if they can help secure your account. Worst case scenario, may just have to get a whole new account.

I would do what alex said and make it a good password

tips for passwords
http://www.productivity501.com/10-tips- ... words/253/

Do you know for a fact that it came from your Hotmail account? Anyone can forge the "From" address on email, so they could be sending it from somewhere else with your address in the "from" field. There's really nothing you can do to stop that.

true but the spammer shouldn't have access to her contact list.

I have you on my contact list, have you ever gotten any from my email?

@alex I changed my password and now to see if it works

@ t0 I was told by someone on another forum he has been receiving spam from my email address too but he just deletes it. I don't know if it's coming from my account.

I too had a problem with spam being sent to all the addresses in my address book. I had to delete all of the names in my address book because it appeared that the Trojan was continually cycling and kept sending out new emails every few days. Knock on wood, since doing that, I have not had a problem

It is possible that your computer has been hijacked by malware that sends email to your contacts and to random addresses. It is possible that your email account has been cracked (i.e. someone has guessed / found the password) and is using it to send email.

It is also possible that the sent emails have nothing at all to do with you or your account, but someone has a list of fake and real email addresses, including yours, to send spam. You can ask your friend who has received real and spam email from you to compare the headers in two of these emails - something like View -> Message source - and look through the chain of Received: lines near the top, for the last-named server. Both messages will come from the same or similar servers.

It is a part of the specification of email servers that anyone can send an email out through their server with any From: value at all (the sender does not need to be authorised, or registered with that server, or registered anywhere), which simplifies sending email while mobile, but makes spam very easy.

I have some spam here, where you can see that the From: is a (real) Gmail address while the last-named Received: server is actually a Yahoo! server, so it was not sent from Gmail at all:

Ditto what t0 says. The most likely explanation is that spammers (who already know your email address) are using it in the from/reply to fields. So you account hasn't been hacked or anything. I've heard of this happening to lots of people. Suddenly they start getting hundred or even thousands of emails from people telling them to stop sending them spam and they are totally innocent. All the spammers want people to do is click on links in the emails - they don't care and are not interested in whose email address they put in reply/from fields. In fact by picking random "good addresses" there are more chances of their spam getting delivered without it being blocked by filters.

If you start getting hundreds or thousands of replies then the most sensible solution is to abandon that email address and get another one.

I had the exact same problem with my Hotmail e-mail account. There were spam messages being sent out to everyone in my contacts list. A few people brought this to my attention, and I apologized and explained that I was not sending the e-mails, but that someone had spammed, or hacked my e-mail account.

To fix the problem, I would suggest changing your password to your e-mail account. It is recommended that the password is at least 8 characters long, with a combination of letter, numbers, and/or symbols. I changed my Hotmail password, and after checking my "Sent Items" box, I no longer see spam e-mails sent from my Hotmail account. I hope this information helps.

The best way is to reformat some malware are encrypted and are very hard to detect
Also open the processes list from task manager to see if there is any weird processes running
Keyloggers written in Vb.net that use get async key ,use the registry startup and email sending method are not detected by microsoft security essentials and even though they are simple to code might not be detected your best bet is either reformat and get a good anti virus

Mine started doing this too so I deleted all of my contacts, made a new password, and made a new e-mail account just in case. Kind of embarrassing to have your e-mail address sending out spam when you have professional relationships with a lot of your contacts.

Update:

I changed my password and someone who is on my contacts list has not gotten any from me nor have I gotten these strange emails saying Failure Delivery Notification. I never knew there was a sent items folder. I guess that is one way of knowing your email is sending out spam.

Luckily lot of people know about this stuff so they would know it's not you sending them it.

Out of curiosity, did you give your password to anything which could possibly be a phishing site? Or did you find any malware on your computer? Or use the same password for your e-mail account as you do elsewhere online?

BTW, ages ago, I an e-mail account of mine had the problem where some spammers were using my address in the from field. Hasn't happened for ages though *touch wood*