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I am having a problem that I hope someone can help with. Yesterday afternoon I received about a dozen mailer failures on e-mails that I never sent. Unfortunately, they were sent to friends and were from a Canadian pharmacy, which I also have never heard of. I have never ordered online at any pharmacy. I contacted Yahoo--haven't heard back yet. Does anyone have any idea what caused this or how to stop it? Thanks.
I am having a problem that I hope someone can help with. Yesterday afternoon I received about a dozen mailer failures on e-mails that I never sent. Unfortunately, they were sent to friends and were from a Canadian pharmacy,
Could you clarify If they failed how they could be sent to your friends?
I am having a problem that I hope someone can help with. Yesterday afternoon I received about a dozen mailer failures on e-mails that I never sent. Unfortunately, they were sent to friends and were from a Canadian pharmacy, which I also have never heard of. I have never ordered online at any pharmacy. I contacted Yahoo--haven't heard back yet. Does anyone have any idea what caused this or how to stop it? Thanks.
I have had that happen once from someone else's email to mine and once sent out my account. It is spam. Somehow the spammer gets your contact information and sends out the emails using your email address. There usually is a link instead the email. Never open a link you don't know how it came. They are easily detected... what friend sends you an unsolicited link to a pharmacy?
It is frustrating and causes a headache. The way I found out it happened is like you, I had emails that were undeliverable and came back as failures as you mentioned.
All you can do is let your friends know (in your contact list) that this has happened and tell them you didn't send it and not to open the link.
If someone else might have a better explanation or more information,
Thanks for the replies. I actually had sent an e-mail to my doctor and that is when I received the mailer failure. Once I realized what was occuring, I deleted all of the mailer failures. I will definitely make my contacts aware. Thanks.
Sounds like your email has been hacked and is being used to send spam emails to your contacts, which is very common for yahoo accounts. Change your password.
He hasn't been hacked. He is either being spoofed or someone he knows is infected with malware that sets up a litte mail server on the PC in question and floods the internet with spam. It changes the From: to a random contact in the attacked persons address book: you. So all the bouncebacks come back to you.
As more and more people drop mail clients for webmail this is becoming scarcer.
When a person hacks into your email address the first thing they do, if they know what they are doing, is change your password.
MOST of the time it is spoofing. There is little you can do but just hang in there until they stop abusing your address as the return address. Usually only lasts a week or 3 and then they move on to a new one.
He hasn't been hacked. He is either being spoofed or someone he knows is infected with malware that sets up a litte mail server on the PC in question and floods the internet with spam. It changes the From: to a random contact in the attacked persons address book: you. So all the bouncebacks come back to you.
As more and more people drop mail clients for webmail this is becoming scarcer.
When a person hacks into your email address the first thing they do, if they know what they are doing, is change your password.
MOST of the time it is spoofing. There is little you can do but just hang in there until they stop abusing your address as the return address. Usually only lasts a week or 3 and then they move on to a new one.
Yahoo email gets hacked all the time. They use bots to gain access to email accounts and auto mail spam through them. The bots don't change the password as they don't want the account holder to realize the account is compromised so they can use it as long as possible. If they change the password the holder knows immediately when they try to log in and can try to reset the password or contact yahoo if the password reset was changed.
I agree it could also be spoofing but since it is so common for yahoo accounts to be hacked and used by bots to send spam I just jumped to that conclusion. It happened to my wife recently on her yahoo account and I got one of the spam emails. I believe it was also one of the online pharmacy emails. Some of her other contacts also told her they got them. I had her change her password that afternoon and it didn't happen anymore. Of course it could have been spoofed but they only did it the one time and her computer is clean so it wasn't originating from her machine. Another possibility could be that the addresses were harvested from someone else's account where all of the email addresses of recipients in some of the joke emails that have been all over were harvested.
Thanks for the replies. Last night I got a message from Yahoo (I sent them one when the mailer failure occurred) and they said it looked like my account had been compromised. I changed my password. I do believe that a friend's e-mail has a virus because of something that was on Facebook. While I rarely post on FB, I use it to contact students. Unfortunately, the virus was from an adult's account. I have used my work e-mail to notify people not to open anything from my Yahoo account until I notify them that it's okay. Yesterday I deleted 6 more mailer failures. I am always careful not to open any e-mail from anyone who I don't know. However, the new "trick" is to send it with your name and no subject. Since I never send an e-mail without a subject line, I knew that this was spam. Thanks again everyone.
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