Emails Sent That I Did Not Send.

You need to ask the question, are ONLY your contacts getting these or are a lot of other folks as well.

If only you contacts are, then once of two things is occurring.  First someone has hacked your account.  Change your password at once.  Second, someone has used the CC list on some of your emails to resend spam to the recipient list.

The other option is that you are experiencing email address harvesting.  What happens here is that a spambot "harvests" your email address form a public forum or email that it scanned.  It then send the address back to the spammer who uses it to send out bulk mail.  The though here is that since it appears to be a legitimate email address perhaps the spam filters will let the bulk emails though.  Also you get all the bad address bounce-backs and not him.

With harvesting there is little you can do.  Once something is out on the Internet it's there forever.  The thing you can do to mitigate the issue is never post your email in the open.  If you use a signature change the email to read "bob AT bob DOT com".  A person can fix that before emailing you but a spambot will ignore it since there is no @ symbol.

First off try changing your password to something secure.

My standard "password security" speech...

For secure passwords you should follow these  guidelines.  
- No less than 8 characters.
- Mix upper and lower case.
- Include numbers and non-alpha characters such as !, [, &, and #.
- Don't make it so complex to be easy to forget.
- Use a phrase, pick first or last letter of each word.
- Swap letters with number, o = 0, s = 5, i or l = 1 or !, q = 9, etc.
- More is better up to a point, 10 to 18 characters is a good size.

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Licenses & Certifications: Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, Novell, FCC RF & Amateur Radio licensed.

It sounds like your account has been hacked.  First thing you need to do is - change your password immediately!!!  This will in most cases stop the hackers from using your account.  Most of the time, they have just hacked your password.  Change it to at least 8 characters, upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols.  This provides the safest password you can design.  Next, run a program to search for any trojans that you may have accidently obtained.  Two good 'FREE' programs available on the interent are Spybot and Malware.  I use these exclusively and they have worked above and beyond most pay programs.  You can make donations to them if you like.