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Spammer Question with Webmail server

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Stoic Joker:
It isn't in her outbox, and the headers look like it came from Yahoo servers, but it does include contacts from her contacts list?-wraith808 (December 05, 2013, 03:53 PM)
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Classic spam trick is to use the first half of an address book to validate spam sent to the second half of the address book. This is actually fairly easy, because most people in any social circle have many contacts in common. Chances are your wife's account and machine are fine...but one of her friends got hit and her address is just cyclically bubbling to the top for "validation". And if that person is also on a Yahoo account it adds veracity to the appearance of the headers by "legitimately" pushing it through their hijacked Yahoo account.

Carol Haynes:
Probably not a spam trick - Yahoo servers have been under attack for at least 2-3 years and regularly hacked into. Accounts have been compromised without passwords being needed.

I have had many Yahoo customers (and BT/Yahoo users) in the UK who have had spam sent out to their entire contact list and I know this has been an issue worldwide for a long time.

Also check any email addresses attached to your account - one other trick from this hacking I have seen is a bogus email address added in to your account settings which means that if you try to change the password the spammers are informed too!!!

I have also seen some people locked out of their account by passwords being changed by unknown parties - so far managed to get their accounts reinstated.

Best advice at the moment is find an alternative email provider and make sure you backup you address book from Yahoo and then delete your entire content list from their servers otherwise it will continue to happen.

40hz:
Best advice at the moment is find an alternative email provider and make sure you backup you address book from Yahoo and then delete your entire content list from their servers otherwise it will continue to happen.
-Carol Haynes (December 06, 2013, 07:40 AM)
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Good advice. Especially since it's so inexpensive to register a domain name these days. Most registrars throw in one free POP email account as part of the deal. GoDaddy wants something like $3/mo for single and $5/mo for 5-address e-mail hosting. I'm sure there are better and cheaper providers out there too.

wraith808:
Oh... I have a domain.  And have her an address on it.  And on gmail.  And on a google hosted domain.

But since she's been using this for over 10 years, none of my efforts to get her off of it have worked...  :-\

40hz:
^Yup. I deal with that too. I still have two clients that insist on using their AOL accounts for their main business email address.   :-\

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