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Hi Tina. No, your mail was not hacked and yes, changing the password will prevent anyone without the new password accessing your mail. What has happened is some spammer somewhere used your email address as the reply-to address on his spam. Anyone can use any address on email if they don't care where the replies go. The spammer does this to defeat anti-spam measures that confirm an email address is valid before accepting mail from it. The spammer could have gotten your address dozens of different ways - from postings on the net, from someplace you've given your email address, from infecting someone's computer who has your address in their addressbook, etc. There is no way to stop this happening and changing your email address to a new one will not stop this from happening again. The good news is that a spammer will only use an address for a small run of spam email - otherwise they risk getting filtered out - so any bounced messages you're getting will peter out pretty quick. Spammers have literally millions of email addresses to use so you should only see this sort of thing once in a while. Most mail systems are smart enough to not bounce undeliverable spam email to the reply address on the email, since it is always some innocent third party such as yourself at the receiving end of it. Some mail systems aren't so clever and they will bounce the undelivered spam. So, main point is this is not a big deal and will happen from time to time to you and most other internet mail users, the bounces will pass, and there is not much to be done about it by either you or us. On Thu, 21 Feb 2008, Tina Como wrote: > Hi - my username tinacomo@chebucto.ns.ca has been hacked - I changed the password but I'm still getting all the returned mail. Will changing my username stop that returned mail from reaching me? If so, how do I go about doing getting a new username? > > I appreciate any help you can give me with this matter. > > Tina
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