Who is using my e-mail address?

[Pickle]

Can anyone shed some light on this for me - Last night, over a 5 min period my hotmail account received about a dozen failure notices telling me that e-mails had been returned as users unknown. The problem is - I didn't send those e-mails and no-one else used my computer. It makes me think that someone is using my address. I've changed the account password but is there anything else I should do - and can I find out who is doing it?

[Pickle]

Tab down to answer

[j2buttonsw]

No-one can stop people "spoofing" your email address: even I could send messages that appears as though they were from you it with my home setup if I knew what your email address was. The problem is that I can't receive any email from this address. People spoof millions of email addresses (especially Hotmail accounts), it is all part of spam. The best advice is to create a Hotmail account with a very unlikely/uncommon/unusual name that no-one would think to spoof. For example [email protected] would unlikely to be spoofed.

[ajmmac]

not sure if this is exactly the same--but i was asked to checkout a pc which had received over 70 such mails within a few mins--after investigating i came to conclusion it was a virus which had accessed the customers address book and had sent whole load of emails--i cleaned it out and the machine was fine after that--however i can't recall the name of the virus--was over a year ago--and it happened within outlook express--not hotmail--also does not explain why mails were returned since presumably the addresses were correct--still would do no harm to do a complete virus check

[ajmmac]

ps maybe it was a pretty stupid virus that couldn't read too well

[Pickle]

That's what I thought at first too, ajmmac. I did a complete virus check and spyware check. Didn't find any viruses, stupid or otherwise!

[ajmmac]

figured u would have done a scan pickle--this is quite puzzling--if it is indeed a person using ur email address why would they be sending mail to addresses which don't exist and hence have them returned to u--the only puspose i can think of is to be a nuisance to u--that still suggest to me some sort of software corruption--also you report "i've changed the account"-was this at the time or recently--in any case i suggest u report it to hotmail as an abuse and see if they can come up with anything--good luck

[Pickle]

Hotmail said (in a nice way) - 'go away, nothing we can do, what do you expect for a free service'. I suppose they have a point.