Several people have posted that they have had issues with their e-mails.

Are you willing to say who your e-mail service is through?

such as [email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
etc.

Might there be one service/provider that is more vulnerable than others?

Mine is AOL, but only three people commented that they had
rec strange sales pitches from me.

No one else...so far.

2 of my friends had problems with Hotmail

I have netzero and have had no problems.

The only problem I;ve had with gmail had to do with using it from more than one computer and forgetting my password when an update cleared out all the 'saved' passwords on that computer. Once I figured out how to retrieve the password to use on that computer everything was ok.

Their spam filter seems to be really good!

I like Gmail a lot. It puts all the junk in my spam.

hotmail seems to be having a lot of problems

I posted recently about problems with hotmail.com. They seemed to have made lots of changes lately and I think that's why I had problems. Have to say I don't care for their latests changes, a confusing array of services that I don't use. Hotmail is my mail email and it would be time consuming for me to change over to another server.

I do have back up emails at yahoo and gmail. One thing I like about yahoo is that I can print out the whole email, not like hotmail where I get all the ads and stuff on the sides and very little of the email. So when I want to print out a hotmail email I forward it to my yahoo addy. May in Jersey

The members who have been talking about emails being sent out from their email accounts, from other sources, have been hacked.

This can happen with any email provider, somehow, some way, your password was found out.

Certain savvy hackers can get into email accounts by using a back door and gain access that way also. This happens more rarely than hackers tricking you into giving up a password.

I have seen many sites that ask for my password to my email account, I don't give it up... Facebook is one...
Why do they need MY password to anything other than my Facebook account?

Many of the sites on Facebook pages (and other sites) may look like they are a part of Facebook, but they are independently ran. I know family who thought they were ok giving up their password to them, and they were hacked a short time after. Yes, they advertise fun games and sites, but those places are not always 100% legit.

So, no matter which email provider you use, if you give up your email password to another site, you are opening the door to getting your email account hacked.

Also, if you use the same password for everything? How hard is it for a bogus site that you register with, to figure out trying the password you use there, on your email account you registered with them? I know a lot of people who use the same password for everything, yes it makes it easier to remember, but it opens you up for attack from unscrupulous people.

Edit** I think we see some email providers names mentioned more often than others because of their popularity. Hot mail, yahoo and g mail being three of them. They may offer more bells and whistles than the email that your internet provider offers :wink: and so many go to these sites for their email services.

I have received some bogus emails from friends who use hotmail. I have gmail and have been pleased with it - very few junk emails make it to my inbox, and it seems to be pretty used friendly, but it's not like I use too many of the features on it.

May in Jersey - I assume they still offer it, but at one time gmail had it so you could automatically forward mail from another address to your gmail which is how I slowly transitioned mine from hotmail way back when.

Amma - very good point about the passwords. Another option is to use something similar, but different for each site. I won't go into detail what I do, but I have a different password for each site that's difficult to figure out (definitely not something contained in the dictionary), but easy to remember.