Hijacked!

[Kim]

It seems that my email address has been hijacked & is being used to send out thousands of spam emails.  
I'm getting masses of returned mails & warnings from various places.
it is "anyname"@molkara.fsnet.co.uk thousands of mails & thousands of different names, being used.
I'm worried that my emails will end up being blocked, as suspected spam.
I contacted wanadoo, last time it happened, but they told me there is nothing I can do! Is this right???

[Pammy]

Kim - this sounds just awful. Sorry I have no solution for you - but I will ask some friends who might know what you can do

[Pammy]

It seems there is nothing you can do. Your account hasn't been hijacked but is being spoofed - ie a mailer is using your addy to send stuff without bothering with the rest of your account. They won't have access to your account so you should be safe on that front. But it's the inconvenience you're left with.

Sorry it's not good news I'm afraid.

A bit more

This is a common problem. I suffered with it myself with my domain using my own mail server last year and was getting hundreds of thousands of bounced reply mails daily.

I am surprised FSNet does not have controls to stop this abuse. FSNet should be registered with http://spf.pobox.com/, which drastically reduce this problem or knock it on the head altogether.

Contact FSNet and ask what can be done - She may already have the control to bounce these messages at source in her control panel.

[Pammy]

Another response from someone who also used Wannadoo

I WAS also with Freeserve (fsnet) I wrote numerous e-mails to Freeserve pleading with them to do ANYTHING to stop the problem, but all I got back were useless replies stating that someone might 'accidentally' have typed in my e-mail addresss. At the height of the problem I was getting in excess of 500 returned e-mails per day!!!!

Your friend can log onto the members page at Wanadoo (The owners of fsnet) and reoprt each e-mail (en-bloc) as spam. This is then supposed to be actioned by Wanadoo technical support!!

I found that the e-mails peaked and gradually eased off to a controllable number, but eventually I shopped around and got a much, much better deal from an Internet provider who is quite literally at the end of a telephone call!

Sorry to be a defeatist, but Wanadoo were simply not interested.

[Kim]

Thanks Pammy

[ReadingSteve]

Only thing you can do in a case like this is to change your email address. Stop using the old one and tell all your friends what the new one is.

My advice on email addresses is to make them difficult to guess.  Use something like
firstname9876lastname@yahoo.com for example.

It's quite true that anyone can impersonate another person using email. That's another reason why you have to be SO careful about any emails purporting to be from Amazon, Ebay or bank/credit card companies. They're nearly all spoofs trying to get you to divulge your account information via dummy websites. BE CAREFUL OUT THERE!

[loubylou]

Seems like ReadingSteve is right. Most ISP's provide several email address that you can use, I'm with Tiscali and can Have 6 all together.

My OH has a GMail account. He said he'll send you an invite if you want one. Just have a look at the link.

If any one else wants one just let me know and I'll tell him