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Email hacked with own email address

  • 4 odgovori
  • 1 ima ovaj problem
  • 38 views
  • Posljednji odgovor poslao dean50

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Someone hacked my email with my own email address. I've changed passwords to my thunderbird email as well as the host site. Any suggestions on what to do?

Someone hacked my email with my own email address. I've changed passwords to my thunderbird email as well as the host site. Any suggestions on what to do?

All Replies (4)

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If you mean some nefarious person has been abusing your email address and making it look like you're are sending emails when you are not - it does not necessarilly mean they have hacked your account.

Hacked cases are much rarer and more complicated and often you will not get access to change your password because the abuser has already altered it and the recovery address. So if you can still get access to webmail account and change passwords then I doubt if your account has been hacked.

Maybe you got a mailor daemon email saying an email could not be delivered, but you never sent it. You got that email because the real sender pretended to be you and entered your email address so if the TO email address did not exist then you got the bounce back. To be honest that was actually very helpful for you because it means you know someone was sending emails using your email address. So, it would be a good idea to let all your family and friends know what has been occuring just in case they also received an email reportedly from you containing something which could cause damage. Suggest you also state you are always going to use a specific signature, so recipients will know it really is from you. In these cases, the abuser gets bored with your email address if it does not get the reponse they are looking for and stops abusing it.

Sometimes spammers are a real pain in the proverbial. They enter your name as the display name in the email address because it often gets around junk filters in email clients. Sometimes they enter your email address so it looks like it was From you and the purpose is to avoid spam filters. The spammers/hoaxers really are trying to get into your Inbox and then they usually try to trigger your curiousity with the content or attachment. Do not be conned into responding or clicking on anything in the email or trying to open any attachments.

If you are really concerned if they have somehow got your 'password' which is not the same as abusing an email address, then do the following:

Exit all programs. Start computer in 'Safe Mode' (not Safe mode with Networking) Run full scans. This scan will detect if there are any unwanted keylogger programs running which provide info about what keys you press on keyboard - eg: passwords. It should auto fix these issues if they are present. If anything comes back saying there is an issue in Thunderbird profile maybe an email, do not let it do an auto fix as it might cause a bigger problem deleting a load of emails. Just make a note of the problem file info. It's much better to locate and delete the email within Thunderbird and then compact the folder to really get rid all deleted data.

Once you know your computer is ok, I think you can assume you resetting a password is also ok. However, If something - virus - trojan - keylogger etc is detected and gets fixed. After it is fixed, restart Computer and immediately update password in webmail and then in Thunderbird.

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Someone is demanding a bitcoin payoff. There are no error messages are an inability to use my email. It’s someone sending me emails using my email address wanting me to send them bitcoin.

They’re sending about 2 emails every minute. I’ve blocked my email address so I don’t see them although they’re still coming. Am trying to figure out a way to get rid of them.

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Nefarious phishing scammer - nuisance but very important you do not select anything in that email. I've had those as well. It stopped in the end although I've had it occur a couple of times. Blocking your own email address is not exactly going to help when you get genuine emails.

Allow your email address again.

Try this: Create a Message Filter

  • Tools > Message Filters
  • Filters for: mail acount name/email address
  • click on 'New'
  • give filter a suitable name like 'Scam Block'
  • Select 'Getting new mail'
  • Select 'Filter before junk classification'

I'm not sure where 'bitcoin' is mentioned so select 'Match ANY of following', so you can catch it if entered in various places.

  • select 'Match any of following'
  • 'Subject' 'contains' and type: bitcoin
  • click on small + to add a new line
  • 'Body' 'contains' and type: bitcoin

Perform these actions:

  • 'Move message to' and select the 'Trash' folder on account.
  • Click on 'OK'
  • Enable the 'Scam Block' filter.
  • Click on 'Filter Log'
  • select checkbox 'Enable the filter log'
  • close Filter Log window - top right x.

This will then ignore the FROM etc details but locate something which you say is all those emails the word bitcoin. It should locate and send the emails to trash and then you can set up Thunderbird to auto empty trash on exit.

Bottom line is this. You cannot stop the sender from sending them. You can filter them automatically so you are not dealing with them.

You could see if you can block them via webmail account using similar filter - if body content contains bitcoin then put in Spam or put in Trash. I prefer Trash because you do not want to get your own email address registered as sending spam even if if wasn't you.

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Great; thank you for the help; will update if there are any continuing issues; thanks!