E-mail Problem / Spam or Virus

[emeritus]

Anyone advise please ?

My wifes Hotmail account contains lots of Non Delivery notifications of an e-mail to friends and family that she has not sent. It seems to be an advertisement for a company called Biz-ele.com. This e-mail is not showing in her sent box.

Having googled this company it appears that a lot of people have had this problem.

How does this happen and what do we need to do now.
She has changed her Hotmail Password.

Thanks

[Buenchico]

Changing her Hotmail password won't help. She needs to change her email address (to something which is unlikely to be randomly generated by a computer) and then be exceptionally careful who she discloses it to.

When spammers send out thousands (or, more likely, millions) of emails, they'll frequently send them to random addresses generated by their computer (e.g. [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]) in the knowledge that many will 'bounce' but quite a lot will find their way to genuine email accounts.

To try to get people to open the spam mail and read it, they forge its origins, so that the mail appears to come from a genuine address. To do so, they'll either select a genuine address that they've found on a website (or someone has innocently given away when registering for an internet-based service) or use a likely looking address generated by their computer (such as [email protected]).

If the forged 'sending' address coincides with a genuine address, the owner of that address will receive a bounce message back from every non-delivered message sent out by the spammer. If the spammer continues to send mail out using your wife's email address in the 'reply to' field, she'll continue to get loads of bounced mail messages.

She should change her email address to something that is unlikely to be generated at random by a computer. [email protected] is very likely to be generated by a computer which produces [email protected], [email protected], . . . , etc but [email protected] would be less likely to be generated at random.

Then she should take care only to reveal that address to close friends. If she needs to use email for work, she should set up a different account. If she needs an email address for online shopping, she should use yet another account. Then, if one mail box starts to suffer problems from spammers, she can easily ditch that

[Buenchico]

. . . account, without the need to notify lots of people.

Hotmail's a waste of time anyway. It's far better to use a service which is reliable (which Hotmail certainly isn't) and allows you to access mail via a dedicated email client (e.g Outlook Express or Thunderbird) as well as via the web. The most frequently recommended service is GMail but I prefer Gawab. See paragraph 3, et seq, of my post here for instructions how to set up a free Gawab account:
http://www.theanswerbank.co.uk/Technology/Inte rnet/Question407429.html

Chris

[emeritus]

Thanks Chris, lots of good advice.

Very much appreciated