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To: Retired Chemist
I see no reason to suspect that someone has hijacked your account. I see no reason to suspect that someone is using your account to send messages.

They are forging your email address (and millions of other email addresses) in spam that they send out from the tens of millions of PC's that they have compromised (almost all Windows PC's). They send out spam, claiming to be from you (and me and probably everyone else on this thread.)

The intended target of the spam is more likely to read email if it looks to be from someone with a plausibly real email address, not from "3ccf259cac0183@aol.com" or some such nonsense.

When some of that spam bounces (because it was sent to an invalid email address) the notice that the spam couldn't be delivered goes back to your email account, because the email claimed to be from you. But you had nothing to do with that bounced message; you just ended up seeing the bounce.

There is nothing you can do about this, other than improving your spam filters. You can keep trying to change your email address, but that's a pain in the backside if you actually expect anyone to ever send you something useful.

Those of us, such as myself, whose email address has been "pj@usa.net" for perhaps a decade now and which I have never attempted to hide, end up getting thousands of messages a day. My spam filtering skills have become expert over the last decade.

30 posted on 04/15/2008 9:43:33 PM PDT by ThePythonicCow (By their false faith in Man as God, the left would destroy us. They call this faith change.)
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To: ThePythonicCow

“There is nothing you can do about this, other than improving your spam filters.”

I disagree with this. You *can* attempt to read the header information off the original email and determine a consistent source IP. This has worked or me in the past with unsophisticated spoofers. Then you can whois them and get contact info.

Another option is to check what site they are referencing in the original email. It is possible you can whois that and get the administrative contact for the domain. There is a decent chance, however, that the info there will be bogus, too. When it was kiddie porn, it turned out to be some poor woman in Kentucky who didn’t have a clue what was happening when I called her. She had already called the FBI re: identity theft.


31 posted on 04/15/2008 9:48:52 PM PDT by bolobaby
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