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Hi Sheila,
Your account hasn't been hacked.
Spammers use addresses they skim from mailing lists, newsgroup postings,
webpages (like Facebook or MySpace) etc to forge outgoing email addresses to
millions of unlucky recipients. They used your email address as a 'From:',
knowing that any bounces will go to you and not them. Spammers use
'valid' forged addresses because many mail services will check (via a ping
across the internet) to see if a sender address is valid before even
allowing an email into their queue.
There's really nothing you (or anyone) can do about it. The only way to
minimize spam and things like email forging is to never post, write or
advertise your email address anywhere including webpages. Even then, you
would be surprised how spammers can still get your email address. Since you
weren't the one sending the emails, just delete the bounces and chalk it up
to experience on the internet.
Spammers rotate among millions of addresses at any given moment so your
address may or may never be used again. The reason you see the bounces is
that lazy admins of spam filters around the world send bounces back to the
sender, even though that address may be forged (instead of checking the path
and IP numbers which will give you the real sender most of the time), so the
innocent address owner gets the bounce from the email the spammer sent.
CCN Help
----------------
On Fri, 27 Nov 2009, Sheila Gordon wrote:
> Just a note to let you know that I am quite sure someone is hijacking my
> email. I have received several messages about undeliverable mail to weird
> address. Do you wish to see any of these?
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