All clear – a spammer no more
My career as an unwilling, unwitting spammer has come to a close. At least I hope so.
I heard from Yahoo’s mail support team today, less than 24 hours after I sent two notices about a flood of spam messages that hit many folks on my Yahoo contacts list Monday morning.
Here's the official reply:
Hello Al,
Thank you for writing to Yahoo Mail.
It appears you may have received a return message due to a worm virus.
This does not mean that your computer has been infected with the virus,
but most likely a computer that contains your e-mail address within its
address book has.
These particular viruses spread by sending users an e-mail from a
seemingly reliable source asking them to open an attachment containing
the virus. Once a user contracts the virus, it then spreads itself by
sending out new infected messages using contacts from within (that user’s)
address book.
Most e-mail system administrators are aware of these particular types of
viruses and have set up protective measures to prevent others from being
infected. Because of these measures put in place by this particular
domain, the virus’s attempt at spreading using your e-mail address failed.
Please know there is a possibility of receiving further return messages
similar to what you have reported. Yahoo is unable to prevent these
messages from generating, however if you are a Yahoo user and would
like to direct them out of your inbox, you may want to use our
filter feature to do so.
Filters automatically sort your incoming messages into the folders of
your choice, according to the rules that you set up. The benefit of
filters is that you don’t need to read through each message to decide
where it goes. For example, you could create a filter so that messages
such as the failure deliveries you have received filter automatically to
your “trash" folder. If you are interested in using this feature,
please visit the link below for instructions:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/mail/manage/
Thank you again for contacting Yahoo Mail.
Regards,
Jackson
About an hour after I got this message, I had trouble getting into Yahoo mail on my iPhone. An error message told me the system couldn't authenticate my sign in. I re-entered my password several times to no avail.
So, I went to my desktop, where I was already signed into Yahoo mail. I logged out and tried signing in again. This time I got a message saying that Yahoo detected recent unusual activity in my account and that I needed to create a new password.
The process was simple. I entered my old password as directed, then a new one twice. Voilà — I was back in my Yahoo mailbox. I used the new password on my iPhone and I was in there, too.
As you can see from the Yahoo support team’s message, there is no clear reason why my account was temporarily compromised to send spam. The best guess is a worm virus, but where it originated is the mystery.
My advice to you is to change your passwords frequently. It can be a temporary hassle, but the grief you save will be your own.
