My Email Is Piggybacked Onto A Stranger's & I Get Spam From The Irs, Etc.

Somehow my email got mixed up with some stranger's & I get spam from parking violations and the IRS and who knows what will come later. I do not know what to do. I cannot seem to contact Yahoo. I am afraid that this stranger is in trouble and that I might get inadvertently mixed up into it.

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Answer #1: Posted by kcmjr on July 11th, 2011 10:29 AM

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kcmjr

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What has more than likely happened is that your email address was "harvested" by a spammer from the Internet.

They do this to get past spam filters on email servers. If the email address an email comes from "appears" to be valid the filters will often pass the email through.

The issue is it's a trivial matter to spoof the senders email address. That's what they do, spoof the sender so that the spammers don't get all the "invalid email address" replies. Instead you get them.

Unfortunately there is little you can do about this or to stop it beyond filtering your incoming email. The other thing you can do is to never leave your email address out in the open. Instead of leaving "[email protected]" you leave it as "bob AT bob DOT com". People will need to fix it to send you email but it fools the mailbots fishing for addresses.

It could also be a legitimate mistake. I get emails from folks who mistyped their email address and accidentally entered mine instead. Not frequently, but occasionally.

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

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