email hijacked by spammer

[tfkindig]

some spammer is sending out 100s of emails using my
windows visa windows mail id.

I just installed some updates hoping that will take care of it.

Any help will be most appreciated!

 

[Gary VanderMolen]

Nothing you can do from your end will have any effect, certainly not updates.
Just wait it out. The spammer will switch to a different address shortly.

 

[Patrick Keenan]

some spammer is sending out 100s of emails using my
windows visa windows mail id.

I just installed some updates hoping that will take care of it.

Any help will be most appreciated!

First, change all your passwords. If that doesn't help, you can know that
they are impersonating you, not hacking you. Small comfort, but better
than none.

 

[Sam Hobbs]

Probably (as Patrick Keenan indicated) they are not really using your email
address to send messages; they are "spoofing" your email address. If you
search the internet using words such as:

spoofed spoofing email address

Then you will get more information.

There is something called "Sender Policy Framework" (SPF) that is supposed
to help but when I tried to figure it out it was too technical for me. One
problem is that in their mind, it is the administrators of email servers
that will use it. If you try to use their mailing list to ask questions,
they will tell you to spend many hours to read the documentation. Unless
they finally got the message that it is they that need to learn how to
document their software.

Perhaps a reasonable compromise is to find an email services host that
understands and uses SPF records better than the one you are using.