Somebody has sent out several e mails recently under my e mail address.
They have sent them to people in various parts of the country who I do not know and I have known nothing about them until I have received their confused replies which I have had to answer.
I have changed my password but I do not know how anybody could have got hold of it as I never e mail in public.
Is there anything else I should do to avoid this situation in future?.
Don't open any links in emails you don't recognise, don't reply to emails you're not expecting, either.
what's happened to you isn't uncommon, unfortunately.
If you email someone, they then have your email and if their computer gets hacked, your email will be nicked along with all the rest. If they group email and you are part of the group, then all those people will have your email and if one of them gets hacked.....and so on.
Yes, change your email address. If you ever received spam then your email address is already in the public domain, and even if it wasn't they may have guessed your password.
You may also want to change your email address and let only your closest friends and key contacts know and you could then close the compromised account.
Hopefully they haven't also accessed your AB account !
if emails are going out to people you don't know, then a robot has just got hold of - or simply guessed - the name of your account. There's nothing to do about it but wait till the robot gets bored and finds another email name. It's nothing personal and you haven't been hacked.
If the emails are going out to people you do know then your account has probably been hacked and your address list accessed. To foil that, change your password.
Somebody did once hack AB - or maybe it was just a techie who forgot to tidy things up and swtich off - anyway, pages of lists of ABers and their email addresses were online over a weekend. Not actual identities as such, though.
Perhaps I am fortunate in still having Windows Mail. It seems to be the case that strange things happen regularly on what I understand is 'Net mail accounts'.....Yahoo, Hotmail, Google etc.