Five reasons your closed email account is still sending spam.
Hi, everyone. Leo Notenboom here for Askleo.com.
This is a question that's come up multiple times over the years.
It's actually kind of a frustrating one
and it feels kind of embarrassing if you find it happening to you.
We'll go over some of those issues.
Let's start with the question.
"I closed an email account that had been hacked and was sending my contacts spam.
Even after closing the account, though, the spam to my contacts continues.
Why? How do I stop my email address from sending spam?"
Ultimately, this happens because either the account isn't really closed or
the spammers just don't care that it's closed.
There are many ways this can happen.
Reason number one, your account was never hacked.
It is very possible that even though there has been spam getting sent from your email
address, it's possible that your account was never hacked in the first place.
The problem here is that it is trivial and I do mean trivial to make an email
look like it came from someone other than it really did.
It's called from spoofing.
Got a couple of articles on the topic.
But the bottom line is that from address is not something you can rely on.
It is not necessarily the person actually
sending you the email, especially when it comes to spam.
Now, the question is, why is your email address showing up there?
Well, there's a number of ways your email
address can make it onto the list of spammers email lists, for example.
Are you getting spam?
Of course you are.
The spammers already have your email address.
That they might use it in the front line is not surprising at all.
They often randomly select from line senders fake senders so as to avoid
various types of anti spam detection and blocking.
So it's possible that however they got
your email address, they're just using it for that as well.
Your account, your actual account was
never hacked in order to make that visible.
Reason number two, you may have closed the account.
Hackers might have reopened it.
The way they do this is while they have
access to the account, they can often go in and change your
account recovery information, they might add, or change an alternate
email address, they might add, or change a recovery phone number.
They might use any of the additional
opportunities that the account service provider has to prepare for account
recovery to allow them to prepare for account re hacking.
So once you've recovered your account
and you've set your new password and you're logged into your account again,
if you do nothing else, the hacker could just also recover your
account, reset the password to what they want and start all over again.
The thing to do to avoid this scenario is when you recover a hacked account.
Change everything or at least review
everything that can be used to recover that account,
should you have lost the password, that means things like the recovery email
address, the recovery phone numbers and more.
Reason number three, you reopen the account.
This catches a lot of people by surprise.
A good example is Gmail.
I have a Gmail account.
I use a Gmail account.
It's my Gmail account, right?
No, it's not.
It's my Google account, which means that Gmail is just one
of the many Google services that I have available to me with that account.
Now, I might go and quote unquote,
close my Gmail account, but if I then turn around and log
in to YouTube or Google Docs or something else with that same account,
they see that as, oh, you didn't really want to delete the account.
You want the account to stay open simply by virtue of signing in to some
of the other services offered by the same provider.
Beyond just email, you might have accidentally reopened your own account.
Reason number four, hackers don't need your account anymore.
Once they've gotten into your account,
chances are they've done some data harvesting.
They may have grabbed copies of your emails, both incoming and outgoing.
But more interestingly, there's a good chance they saved a copy
of your address book by virtue of having a copy of your address book.
They don't need your account anymore.
They can send spam to all of your contacts
from wherever they want, however they want your account not being involved.
So the fact that your account had been hacked and if they had access for some
amount of time, that means, yep, they could have grabbed
all your contacts right then and there and all bets are off.
Reason number five, it's not your account anymore.
This one also surprises people.
It doesn't even involve any malicious recovery or access.
What happens is if you close your account and you keep it close, like I said,
you don't access any of the other services associated with that provider.
Eventually that provider is going to say this account is inactive.
You're going to get rid of all the information associated with the account.
And some providers will then make
that email address available for anybody to scoop up as if it had never been used.
Someone else may then open an account with your old email address.
They could be the one that got hacked.
They could be the one showing up in the front address.
They could be the one responsible for all of this through no fault of their own.
Everything that I've talked about so far applies equally to them as well.
They could easily have had the account that used to be yours, hacked,
compromised or whatever, and it could start showing up in spammers lists.
It could start showing up in from addresses.
It could simply be completely unrelated
to you because it's somebody else's account now.
So after all of that, what can you do?
What do you do when other people are getting spam?
That looks like it's from you?
Well, if your account has been hacked, definitely take the time to carefully
audit all of the recovery information associated with that count.
Changing your password is not enough.
You need to audit the account,
go through it very carefully and make sure that the hacker didn't leave themselves
another backdoor, another way into your account.
One thing I can say, closing the account is not my recommendation.
I actually recommend you keep it open.
There's nothing to be gained from closing the account, really.
It doesn't solve anything.
It doesn't stop anything.
You retain more control over what happens to that account.
If you keep the account open,
if you keep your ability to log in to that account, you don't have to use it.
You can switch to a different email address.
You could do that. But I strongly recommend you simply keep
the old account open so that it doesn't fall into somebody else's hands.
Finally, when it comes to spam, honestly, there's nothing that can be done if people
are getting spam, that looks like it's from you.
Your email address is being spoofed in the from field.
There is nothing in your control.
There is nothing you can do.
All you can do is mark as spam the spam you receive
and let other's know that wasn't you, for the spam
that they got that looked like it came from you.
I hope that was helpful.
I know it's not the answer that everybody
wants, but there really is no hard and fast solution to this.
There really is only protection
for updates, for links to related articles.
For comments and more, visit askleo.com/4682.
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is Askleo.com.Thanks for watching.