Mail Delivery Sytem

[davidanthony]

I am getting 5 -8 e.mail messages a day now with Mail Delivery System, Unable to Deliver, and the e.mail addresses are certailny not ones I have sent messages to, many being in France
Any ideas ??

[squarebear]

Yes, a spammer has got your email address and is sending rubbish out with you as the returnee. You are lucky it is just 5-8. One once got me and I got 5,000 a day for about a week.

[Flyhalf]

Change your password for your e-maill account at once.

[davidanthony]

Thanx Big Jack. Do I just delete the existing and enter a new one. ?

[squarebear]

Are you using hotmail, yahoo mail, gmail or something similar?

[Flyhalf]

That will depend on whichever provider you use, but it should be a simple process, probably in "Options" or "Settings".

[jno]

there should be a tab somewhere saying "Change password" or something like that.

However, it doesn't actually mean your account's been hacked. If the people getting emails were those in your address book, it would have been; but it doesn't sound as if that's happened. In which case you needn't change the password; but it's not a bad idea to do it every so often anyway.

[davidanthony]

Tesco mail on Outlook Express.

[squarebear]

In that case, it is more likely that a spammer has got hold of your address rather than actually hacking you. Changing your password won't stop the mails and unfortnately all you can do is either wait until the spammer moves on or get a new email address.

[Maydup]

^^^^ but change the password anyway eh SB?

To something which includes a number and a capital letter as spammers scan email addresses with commonly used passwords until they find one that uses it. EG the names of famous people or regularly used pet names.

[sfby]

Doesn't sound like you've been hacked, but it can't hurt to change your password anyway.

To stop the messages clogging up your InBox, set up a filter to send anything from "Mail Delivery System" (or whatever the exact sender name is) to another folder (suggest you create a new one) which you can check and bulk delete every so often. (That's how I do it with BT Yahoo, but I expect there are similar options with Hotmail etc)