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13 comments on “5 Reasons Your Closed Email Account Sends Spam”

  1. There are a few problems with closing email account even if it’s possible to really do it. 1 A long lost friend or relative may have that address and try to contact you.(It’s happened to me more than once. I check that one once a month to keep it open) 2. If someone innocently opens a new account with your old email address, any email sent to you will go to them. My suggestion: get a new address but keep the old one and check it once a month.

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  2. I will extend Mark Jacobs’ suggestion.
    Keep the old account with really weird, unguessable, information (was your mother’s maiden name actually ck39d$) for everything and save it so that you can get back in yourself. Then (if it is not a huge source of spam), set it to forward to a new account of yours.

    By keeping it and changing ALL the information, you block the spammers from taking it back.

    Another issue is that they may not have actually hacked your account. They may just be spoofing your address. Your friends may be seeing mail that looks like it is from you but isn’t. I get mail from “myself” all the time without my accounts being hacked.

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  3. I’ve been warning my friends and family for years about this. Many years ago I noticed spam emails being sent with warnings and alerts about questionable events and urgently urging the recipients to email everyone in their contacts, often including the sender. That’s it right there! If I was a spammer wanting to build a list of emails to target, I would come up with some crazy story like “wow, there’s a new scam going around where people at Walmart are getting ripped off and the cashiers are getting money from your account by adding a cash-back bla bla bla… Send this to all your contacts right away”. There has been thousands of made up articles and stories from religious subjects to missing children (pretty sad) sent out for the soul purpose of building a database of email addresses. Once they have your contacts, they can just spam them all while putting your email as the sender, it’s really that simple and easy. I usually to people to BCC (blind carbon copy) when sending emails to multiple recipients, this way they don’t get your list of email addresses. Aside from that, there’s not much else you can do to avoid this type of problem.

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  4. I have an older sister that is an avid user of FACEBOOK. She has EVERYONE in creation (including people that died 10 years ago) listed as Friends and Family. Now her Facebook account got hacked or so she thought, but in actuality one of her “Friends” just accessed her list of Friends.

    You see where this leads?

    EVERYONE on her list was bombarded with SPAM to and from everyone else on her list. Some even to and from themselves.

    Since I don’t use Facebook and hadn’t since I registered, I simply de-activated my account. I did this long before my sister’s “hacking”. It was that I was getting requests from her list of friends inviting me to be their friends as well. I was getting 100’s of invitations daily.

    For quite a few years I had my sisters eMail address on my browser’s SPAM list. She also had a habit of forwarding ALL of her eMails to ALL of her friends ALL of the time.

    The point behind this story is that…….
    You don’t need hackers for SPAM just a dumb friend and family member…………….Alan

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  5. Hello, i am wondering. My friend sended me once in every month a spam message for about six months, after that it stoped forever. I live in croatia and i asked him if he sended he said he did not. So he checked his send box and no strange messages and no delivery failure there. It seem that i am the only one recivening from him this spams. Because no one else has complained. He checked even resent activity email and nothing wrong. So he went to the full register of Facebook ip adresses and searched on everyone and nothing strange from a weird country of city. So his Facebook was never hacked even if he had the same password to email and Facebook. I assume this is a spoof but it is scary to think that it maybe was a hack. He can still log in and use his Facebook and email. We are very good friends on facebook comment pictures and that stuff. Should i be worry or not panic so much.

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    • It’s likely that this email isn’t coming from your friend’s email account. Any spammer who know an email address can make it look like it is coming from that address.

      If you’re *repeatedly* getting or sending spam that appears to be from or to a friend or contact it’s possible that the sending email account has been hacked or otherwise compromised. (Typically it’s NOT a virus.)

      I’d point the owner of that sending account at this article:
      http://ask-leo.com/someones_sending_email_that_looks_like_its_from_me_to_my_contacts_what_can_i_do.html

      and if confirmed, make sure they read this one:
      http://ask-leo.com/email_hacked_7_things_you_need_to_do_now.html

      Reply
      • Thanks i feel a bit relived, i got about four messages in a period of 5-6 months and then it stopped and have not happend again in 4 years. He still uses the same account for hotmail and facebook. Facebook as I said was never hacked. We have changed e mails with each other. We did this again this year but nothing has happend like spam but i think it is a spoof like you said was likley. It was no evidence at all. Surley they would like to hack other sites i think like Facebook. He looked then on ip adresses 2012 and looked again 2016 and he said nothing strange ip adress from another city or country. It is so strange. Wouldnt they want to change password or do something more?

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  6. “Many accounts these days are more than just email. A Microsoft account is a good example. On that same account, you may have messaging programs (Skype), calendars, cloud storage (OneDrive), online applications (Office), and much, more. Microsoft accounts are also commonly used to sign into your computer.
    If you cancel the email account and then sign into another service from the same provider using the same account ID and password, you may unknowingly have re-activated the email account.”

    If you cancel your hotmail.com, live.com, msn.com, or outlook.com account which is associated with Skype, OneDrive, OneNote, and/or your Windows login, it’s my understanding that it would close your Microsoft account and you would no longer have access any of those services as you would no longer have a Microsoft account.

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  7. You can readily see how easy the ‘from email’ faking is. Towards half of the spam I get every day appears to come from me!

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