This Is Very Distressing

[chrissa1]

My husband died on 6th February. When I checked his e mails this evening I found that he had loads of Mailor Daemon messages. Supposedly "he" had sent a one line web address to most of the addresses in his address book.
I've spent the last hour copying and pasteing addresses into e mails of apology to all these people.
How can this be happening and how do I stop it happening?

[MarkRae]

Chrissa,

Echoing everybody's expressions of sympathy, and Saxy is quite correct. You might be surprised (or maybe not now!) by just how easy it is to hack into certain email accounts, especially the ones you'd least suspect, like HotMail and Yahoo. GMail is little harder, but not much. Changing the password makes not the slightest difference...

The only way to prevent this from happening is to deactivate the account. This will immediately make it of no use to spammers because it'll no longer be "live". Live email accounts are like gold-dust to these scum, because they use them to make their spam appear to have come from a valid account, which helps the messages bypass spam filters.

[swedeheart]

MarkRae, are they actually ''inside" having a look round with their own human eyes or is it more of a "robotic" kind of thing?

[MarkRae]

Spammers use software, though the technique is the same...

[tamborine]

Clear the cookies at Tools/Options/Privacy/clear cookies. When you log into his account the websites wont be alert to a 'live account'.

Do not reply to spam as that confirms the account is 'live'.

[swedeheart]

Thanks MarkRae.