Prevention of hacking of e-mail address

[Ricco]

Here's one for BlueIvy and the other experts. I am suspicious that my e-mail address has been hacked. I am pretty sure that my system is fairly water-tight so my suspicion is that either my ISP has been rather careless or one of my contacts has been got at. Any suggestions? I can only think that I must change my e-mail addie.

[Metalattakk]

What suggests to you that your email account has been 'hacked'? Are you getting tons of spam all of a sudden, or have you been locked out of your account altogether, or are your contacts reporting strange messages from your email address (that you didn't send, obviously ;))?

A little more information would help a lot.

If it's a spam thing then even the simple action of posting your email address on here (or on any unsecured web page) will get it picked up by bots and crawlers and added to unscrupulous spammers send lists.

Or one of your contacts might have been infected with a virus and the email addresses held in their address book (i.e., yours) have been added to the list.

I doubt your account has been 'hacked' as such, and I can't see your ISP being stupid enough to be 'rather careless' either. Besides, it'd be against the law for them to interfere with your electronic communications, and they wouldn't risk people finding out (and they would, rather easily) about their 'carelessness' as the bad publicity would kill them.

Anyway, rambling on a bit now...


Here's one for BlueIvy and the other experts.Ah, dammit. Wish I'd seen this before I started. I'm no BlueIvy, nor am I an 'expert'. :D

[Ricco]

What suggests to you that your email account has been 'hacked'? Are you getting tons of spam all of a sudden, or have you been locked out of your account altogether, or are your contacts reporting strange messages from your email address (that you didn't send, obviously)?

Getting lots of spam recently - even a few from myself! :eek:


Or one of your contacts might have been infected with a virus and the email addresses held in their address book (i.e., yours) have been added to the list.

This is what I suspect - several of my friends and relations have no idea when it comes to security. Say that they have antivirus (never updated nor run); as for anti-spyware... they want to know what that is. :confused


I doubt your account has been 'hacked' as such, and I can't see your ISP being stupid enough to be 'rather careless' either. Besides, it'd be against the law for them to interfere with your electronic communications, and they wouldn't risk people finding out (and they would, rather easily) about their 'carelessness' as the bad publicity would kill them.

Well, we are talking about Tiscali here; they bought out my ISP and that is about when this started.

Thanks for your suggestions. Am looking into an alternative ISP now - one with a lower contention ratio - mine has gone through the roof since the buy-out.

[Metalattakk]

http://ask-leo.com/why_am_i_getting_spam_from_myself.html (http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://ask-leo.com/why_am_i_getting_spam_from_myself.html)

Your email address is being spoofed. Not much you can do about it now, I'm afraid.

From the page linked above:


The fact that you're seeing your email address used in the "From:" field shouldn't alarm you. It might be annoying, but there's no need to worry about it. You're already on spammers lists to get spam and they're using that same list, or variations of it, to select which addresses to use when spoofing. And there's currently no effective way to stop them from spoofing.So unless the problem is really getting out of hand, I'd suggest you just put up with it.

You could use Mozilla's Thunderbird (http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://www.mozilla-europe.org/en/products/thunderbird/) as an email client, as it has fairly good spam filtering built in.

[Mr_Me19]

I saw a good trick once using gmail. What you do is sign up wit any address. E.g. example@gmail.com Then for each website you can modify the address slightly using a + sign. For caithness.org you could use example+caithnessdotorg@gmail.com

All the emails will be sent to your inbox, but you can use filters to seperate them out. This way if your getting lots of junk emails at the address example+junksite@gmail.com you will automatically know the site that it is from. You can then bring it up with the website staff and you can also use a filter to block all emails from this address.

[Ricco]

Thanks for all the advice - confirms what my suspicions were. I have tried using the filtering processes in Outlook but I just get a bigger set of junk mail each time - guess it doesn't actually stop the stuff coming down, simply shifts it into the junk folder.

I am considering changing to UKOnline - does anyone have any experience of them?

[blueivy]

Thanks for all the advice - confirms what my suspicions were. I have tried using the filtering processes in Outlook but I just get a bigger set of junk mail each time - guess it doesn't actually stop the stuff coming down, simply shifts it into the junk folder.

Very few spam apps kill the spam before it comes down. The one that does spring to mind though is Mailwasher.

If you are using Outlook try Spambayes (http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/). When I last used it it was excellent and is free. There is also a Spambayes plugin for Thunderbird and one for Outlook Express but I couldn't get it to work last time I tried.

[blueivy]

I saw a good trick once using gmail. What you do is sign up wit any address. E.g. example@gmail.com Then for each website you can modify the address slightly using a + sign. For caithness.org you could use example+caithnessdotorg@gmail.com

All the emails will be sent to your inbox, but you can use filters to seperate them out. This way if your getting lots of junk emails at the address example+junksite@gmail.com you will automatically know the site that it is from. You can then bring it up with the website staff and you can also use a filter to block all emails from this address.

Spamgourmet (http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://forum.caithness.org/go.php?url=http://www.spamgourmet.com/) does the same thing. I've been using it for years now.