my e-mail is being used to generate spam, gow do i correct this use by someone else?

Question

i think someone has gained my email address to send and use email

Answer 1

Most of the time an email that is spending spam has not been hacked. Rather it is being "spoofed". Then means the person sending the e-mail picked an address (usually randomly) and altered their account to send e-mail that says in the header it is coming from your account.

First, change the password on you account to lock out anyone who has hacked it.

Then contact your ISP and let them know what is happening. Have a sample of the SPAM available to forward them so they can look at the header information and try to track down the spammer. They can also monitor your account to see if they can caught the hacker.

Answer 2

I think there are a couple of things you might want to do :

1. If you have an antivirus program installed, update it, then run a full scan. If you don't have one, get one SOON. I would recommend Avira AntiVir, standard edition. It's free, and awesome.
2. Run some kind of spyware/adware cleaner, such as Spybot and/or AdAware.
3. Send a message to the tech support for the company you have the email thru, letting them know what is going on.

If you do all that, and this continues to happen, you may want to consider actually closing that email account, and opening a new one. It sounds drastic, but if it has to be done, it has to be done. Good luck.

Answer 3

Change your password first off then immediately contact your email provider with your suspicions. This will allow them to investigate and take action if necessary to stop it. It also allows shows that you are not the orginator of the spam as you wouldn't be reporting yourself.

It may also be that your email address is being spoofed. That is that it isn't actually being sent through your email account it just the headers which are sent with the emails are being altered to make it seem as though they are being sent from your account. This is actually something which you email provider can confirm immediately. There is nothing that you or your email provider can do unfortunately to stop this as you can't control the malicious activies of others however the email provider can trace the email origins and report the originating email server to their service provider in the hope that they may disable their account assuming the don't own the account themselves or haven't tried to conceal the orginating server by careful use of proxy servers.