Spam email is being sent from my Yahoo ID. My anti virous is uptodate and shows no virous How can I fix this?

My contacts receive junk emails in their inboxes under my Yahoo username not my first and last name (which is how I've set my emails to be sent). Almost all those junk messages have attachments, usually images which do not open up. Some of the messages have very improper subjects.

Spam email is being sent from my Yahoo ID. My anti virous is uptodate and shows no virous How can I fix this?
There is not a whole lot you can do. Spammers get your address in a lot of ways including scanning web pages for addresses visible there, checking chain emails for the plainly visible email addresses showing up as people forward the emails, and harvesting them from virus-infected computers.





Once they have your email address, they can easily write their email to appear as if it came from you. Most spammers use programs that fill this information in for them. But in the mechanics of email, there's rarely any verification done to determine that the source of an email is really who it appears to be. It's kind of like taking a bunch of postal letters and writing your neighbor's house address on the return address line--- the mailman is not going to confirm that the letters came from you really.





I'd recommend closing your current address down (just don't use it for a while and Yahoo will turn it off) then setting up two new ones--- one that you only use for family and friends or business contacts that you tell in advance to please not send you chain letters, funny pictures, anything that says "send this to everyone in your address book", and another for posting stuff to the Internet, signing up for newsletters, etc, and for those friends who insist on sending you the silly pictures of the cats or the guy kicking the soccer ball in a kilt... you know the ones I mean! This way, you can shut down the second address as it too gets discovered by spammers and exploited.





Go ahead and report it to Yahoo but do not expect any real action. The resources required to track this to its source are pretty heavy-duty and are not likely to ever track the spammer to its source. Spammers take control of other people's computers, use disposable accounts and use public computers or access points like coffee shops. By the time you trace the email to where it physically came from, the guy has long since vanished.





Go ahead and change your passwords--- good idea to do this from time to time anyway--- but most likely your account has not been actually accessed. They've used other ways to forge your address.
Reply:If they're not using your account...then they're forging your address. Just like they could pretend to be anyone else
Reply:Change your password and make it stronger, ie letters AND numbers.





Also, notify yahoo