This is an appeal to the knowledgeable people of Afterword Towers.
I have a web domain that I use for our families email addresses. Mine seems to have been hijacked and people in my contacts list are getting spoof/spam emails with dodgy links.
I did think I fixed it by changing the password but it still seems to be happening. Short of turning off the email address, is there anything that I can do to stop this happening? I have the domain hosted on 1&1 but there doesn’t seem to be any thing in the FAQs to help me.
Thanks (and apologies to anyone who may have received spam emails about my new hairstyle).
Raise a support ticket to 1&1 and change your password is a good start.
How much are you charging for a 50ml bottle?
£9.99.
If they’re hijacking your account then changing passwords should do it but it’s far more likely that either now, or some time in the past, you’ve had your contact list (from your email client) ‘harvested’ possibly by a bit of malware and a computer is now just sending out emails in your name. Anyone can send emails in any name they want. If I want to send an email that appears to be sent from, say LordReith@BBC.co.uk then I can do it with a very few clicks. If that’s the case, there’s absolutely nothing that can be done about it.
Yup, this is a definite possibility. I had a client (large financial institution) accuse a certain Seattle based provider of email services of being hacked and as a result spamming them, until I showed them the trace details on the email which were coming from a completely different domain. Easy enough to check if it’s really your domain sending the email if you can access a sample (e.g. in Outlook, open the email, go to the File tab in the ribbon, then Properties, and scan through the trace of how it got to you).
Exactly, if Mr Leeds want it checked out then feel free to paste it all into a PM (I don’t need to see any of the actual email and you can edit any apearance of your actual address) and I’ll tell where it came from.
John – just seen this – thanks. I think it’s resolved now (although I never received any of the spams) but my fingers are crossed.
Same thing happened to me a while back. The giveaway to anyone who knew me was that I didn’t live in Argentina, but changing my password did the trick.
It happened to me, on my standard BT account, this morning. Second time in 2 weeks. Password changed, (again) so we’ll see what happens. A friend has had it happen six times with BT. He got so frustrated at BT’s lack of interest that he closed the account and moved email provider. He said that changing his email address, that he’d had for 15 years, gave him sleepless nights. However, 2 years in, no issues.
I have changed my password again and also changed my Gmail password (and put the text message code setting on the Gmail account). I have my emails forwarding to Gmail so it may have been that account that got hacked. I share the same concern about changing my email address so I hope this works.