"Yahoo Accounts and Spam" Topic

A few years back, a colleague of mine passed away and I took over his Yahoo e-mail account which was tied to his business.

The e-mail is monitored through a mail client on a Mac and no one else has the passwords.

So, imagine my surprise when I check my mail this morning and find that this account spammed its address book.

So far, I've ruled out a virus and phishing. The only computer accessing this account is a Mac on a wired connection and the account isn't accessed through a browser but by POP connection.

The only thing I can think of is that the mail connection leaves the account open and doesn't "sign out". That or there's someone/something inside of Yahoo that is accessing the user passwords and address books from the inside much like AOL had about 10 years ago.

I'd rather not delete the account yet as I still get the occasional contact from a friend who didn't know he'd passed. There doesn't seem to be a way to disable sending mail.

Any solutions?

Wyatt

Definitely change the password.
If it is only sending mail to addresses in the contact list, you could delete the contacts.

You might also alert Yahoo to the situation.

Completely deleted the contacts. I changed the password as soon as it happened. The worst part is that it spammed his family. I sent an apology for that one.

Spammers and hackers should be shot into the sun.

Yahoo knows about these situations as they've been going on since last year. They haven't done much – if anything – to stop the situation.

Wyatt

Oh, and Yahoo's response is singularly unhelpful. They refer you to this site: help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/abuse

As a friend who works for an internet anti-virus company said, "The ISPs know how to stop this, but its cheaper not to."

Wyatt