Something has taken over my address book!

[DuzyEverwork]

As if life wasn't hard enough, 'something' seems to have taken over my address book and is sending emails from my email address.- it's a Chineee firm advertising computer pruducts of all things!.. anything I can do??

[Toureman]

The best thing to do is put your question in the correct category.........

Technology / Computing / Internet.

[Cakeboy]

It may be in the wrong section, but I'll answer it here.

Sounds like you have a little nasty virus or some spyware lodged happily in your computer. I'm assuming you have a virus checker and some sort of spyware protection already. Update these and run full scans of both and that may well solve the problem. Don't be tempted to download another virus checker and run two at the same time as that is completely counter-productive.

If you have no spyware protection or virus protection, and in this day and age, you'd be mad not to, then download one of the following programs and start there. The first two are virus checkers and are both good, I prefer Avast, but that's a personal choice.

AVG Free
http://avast.download--free.net/
Avast Free

Next make sure you've got some form of spyware checker, again there are several excellent free programs out there and you can have more than one of these, and I would recommend you do as most of them will pick up something that the others have missed. I've never found one spyware product that has picked up everything in one scan:

Windows Defender

Ad Aware - click on the free download link on the right

AVG Spyware

If you haven't already, download and run these three programs and see how you get on - they're all pretty simple to understand. Make sure of you can see an option for full/deep scan that you check the box or choose it. It will take a while, but you'll get there i

[Cakeboy]

Part 2:

If you get no joy, post a thread in the Technology section under the Computer sub-forum and give some details regarding what products you've used and what the results are.

As a matter of course, change the password on your email account and anything else that has the same password. It should be one of the things you do monthly anyway as a matter of security to prevent unwanted access - it's surprising the number of people who use the same password for everything and one that's so easy to guess as well.

Hope that helps

[DuzyEverwork]

Thanks for the reply Cakeboy even if it was in the wrong section, I have Spybot but must admit I only run it monthly and not weekly, have now downloaded the AGV Spyware (as I have the AGV Virus checker) and will download and run the other two as well.
I change the password infrequently but will do so more often as you suggest.

Humble apologies for upsetting the pedants among us!

[squarebear]

This doesn't sound like spyware, as the same thing happened to me.

Imagine you are a spammer selling your Vigara pills and you want to email a million email addresses advertising your stuff. You don't know which email addresses you have are genuine and which are fake and if you send an email to everyone you are going to get a load of undeliverable mail.

What they do is to pick a person of the list, in this case you and make it look as if the email has come from your address, so any undeliverables go back to you.

You can't do anything about it apart from wait until they pick someone else, usually in about a fortnight. I was getting 5,000+ mails a day at times.

[DuzyEverwork]

Yep Squarebear I think you might be right, I spoke to Yahoo yesterday and they asked me to expand the headers on the spoof mail and see what the return address was - and sure enough it's mine!
The subsequent thing that has happened is that my Yahoo address book has completely vanished, fortunately I have a copy on my computer so although it was a pain to reinstate I got there in the end. Yahoo say these thing are possibly related and now I have changed my password (again) I hope not to have more problems. Fortunately unlike you I have had no replies to the spoof mailshots (yet!)