Technology in terms you understand. Sign up for the Confident Computing newsletter for weekly solutions to make your life easier. Click here and get The Ask Leo! Guide to Staying Safe on the Internet — FREE Edition as my thank you for subscribing!

How do I stop automatic emails coming out of Hotmail?

Question:

Hey, Leo. I have new issue: every Tuesday, Hotmail sends out the same
message to about six of my contacts automatically. How do I stop this? These
contacts must think I’m an idiot.

In this excerpt from
Answercast #11
, I become suspicious about activity coming out of a Hotmail
account and look at ways to protect your account.

Become a Patron of Ask Leo! and go ad-free!

Unwanted emails to your contacts?

No, they probably don’t think you’re an idiot. They probably think as I do
that your email account has been probably been hacked.

What I would recommend you do immediately is change your password and change
everything that could be used for a password recovery associated with your
Hotmail account.

Changing your security information

I actually have an article on that called “Is changing my
password enough?

The short answer there is “No.”

Compromised computer

The only other thing that comes to mind (since this is a Hotmail account,
it’s not as likely) is perhaps if you’re accessing Hotmail via an email
program, rather than the web; there’s some form of malware on your PC or some
kind of problem with the email program that you’re using.

Fundamentally, this still feels like a hacked email account and that’s the
approach I would suggest you take.

If it continues after securing your account further, then I would start to
look into other ways that your email account is being accessed: if you are
indeed using a PC-based email program.

Next – Can I save my original system restore point?

Do this

Subscribe to Confident Computing! Less frustration and more confidence, solutions, answers, and tips in your inbox every week.

I'll see you there!

1 thought on “How do I stop automatic emails coming out of Hotmail?”

  1. My wife’s email hotmail/live got hacked a recently. A nasty thing called Backdoor:PHP/C99 a Trojan virus.
    It took over her live mail account and sent out spam emails to everybody. I downloaded MS Standalone Sweeper on another computer to disk and ran it on her comput. Took almost five hours but it did find and get rid of the bug. I loaded Bitdefender Internet Security on her comput as she had been using Mcafee which didn’t catch the bug. It tried to get back in but Bitdefender caught it. It did a lot of nasty things while in the comput. Files went missing and others got moved around. Some programs got loaded on that shouldn’t have been there. Whomever took control also hacked our wireless modem and messed with it as well. It took three to four days to get rid of it totally.

    Reply

Leave a reply:

Before commenting please:

  • Read the article.
  • Comment on the article.
  • No personal information.
  • No spam.

Comments violating those rules will be removed. Comments that don't add value will be removed, including off-topic or content-free comments, or comments that look even a little bit like spam. All comments containing links and certain keywords will be moderated before publication.

I want comments to be valuable for everyone, including those who come later and take the time to read.