Well, it's the third time it has happened to me. Someone was able to get to my Hotmail account contacts and sent, yet, another spam. If anyone received an email from me that has the title, "I Well Miss You", don't open it and please know it wasn't from me. My account is closed. My apologies to anyone who received this junk.

From this point on, I will always pm people here before I would send an email.

Hotmail is a free service for anyone to use. Its had problems from the beginning and easy to hack I think. I have always used the email service provided with my server and never have any problems.

This is why I only use the email address provided by my ISP.

Hotmail has a really bad reputation. I'm sorry this happened to you again Ducks. :-(

Did you actually go into your sent mail box and see the sent mail there?

Just because an email shows your email address as the "From:" address doesn't necessarily mean that it was sent from your actual email account. It's possible for spammers to put any From: address on an email.

As an example, I could write a script that would send emails to people with the From: address set as "[email protected]" -- it doesn't mean that the president sent the spam ;) Smart email programs/servers are able to tell that the From: address is different from the server that it was sent from (this is all information that is in the email's header, which is generally hidden from you when viewing the email), and will then block the email as spam or put it in your junk box.

One of the problems is that if someone uses your email as the From: address in a spamming script, if they send the emails to non-existing email addresses, then you'll get the bouncebacks (i.e. emails saying "This email address doesn't exist.") If you get those, it's nothing to worry about -- no one has hacked your email; it's just a spammer using your email address in the From: address to try to trick people into opening the emails.

The first time it happened, I did go into my sent box and saw the list of people from my contact list it went to. I didn't check this last time, though. The account is closed now so I couldn't go back to look.

Thanks you for information. I printed it out to keep in my "Computer Information" file here at work. Thanks.

I use googles Gmail. have never had a problem, but my husband is a creature who does not like like change. and his hotmail account has had the same thing happen to his numerous time. I detest hotmail.

i also use yahoo mail..no problems with it either.

Why do some people have to cause problems like this. It's so sad.

I don't use hotmail. Thanks for the warning, others have had problems with hotmail also.

me too