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Someone is sending messages from my address

FIXED
Alex_Hamilton
Rising Star
Posts: 64
Thanks: 13
Fixes: 2
Registered: ‎15-05-2016

Someone is sending messages from my address

I am being swamped by undeliverable emails that I have not sent. Several hundred only today. Is there something that I can do to stop this?

Many thanks,

Alex Hamilton

3 REPLIES 3
jab1
Legend
Posts: 19,265
Thanks: 6,325
Fixes: 290
Registered: ‎24-02-2012

Re: Someone is sending messages from my address

@Alex_Hamilton Sounds like someone, or something, has found your email address (and password?) and is using your address in the 'from' field of the spam they are sending. Try changing your email password, first, and see if the volume of reports falls off.

John
Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: Someone is sending messages from my address

Fix

In the first instance, you could use an email client (such as Thunderbird, or Pegasus) and write yourself a "Message Filter" rule to move these unwanted messages, as they arrive in your INBOX, to your Trash/Deleted folder.  You could also set the program to delete the contents of the Trash/Deleted folder on exit.

 

To improve on this, you could enable your email client's Junk/Spam filtering tool, and then change the previous filtering rule, to mark the unwanted messages as SPAM and then move them to your Junk/Spam folder (instead of Trash/Deleted), so that the email client 'learns' what these SPAM messages look like, and eventually filter them into Junk/Spam on it's own.

 

Assuming your computer isn't hijacked with malware (and isn't actually sending hundreds of messages), these sort of deluge of undelivered message returns, will often just go away after a few days.

Many years ago, I once switched my computer on one morning and had more than 15000 of these being downloaded, and was receiving maybe another 100 every minute.  My email client wasn't at all happy trying to clear this backlog on 6Mbps ADSL, but using message filtering rules and built in Bayesian SPAM filtering, my inbox has been 99.9% clear of junk ever since, despite frequently receiving approximately 3500 unsolicited message most days.

Alex_Hamilton
Rising Star
Posts: 64
Thanks: 13
Fixes: 2
Registered: ‎15-05-2016

Re: Someone is sending messages from my address

Thank you for the advice. I am using Thunderbird, so put in a filter to direct all these messages to the Deleted folder and to empty that folder on exit.  After about 1000 messages they stopped and I have not had any for 2 days.  Surprisingly, I also received an email from Plus.net informing me that a payment of £269 had been received and if I wanted it back to complete a claim form. I did not even open that email, No doubt my account and pin would be required to get the refund!!!!

Thank you again for advice and support.

Best regards,

Alex