Someone is using my account to send mail - delivery is refused and I get a notification. Why is this and what do I do about it?
Each day I have from one to six messages saying that an email sent under my name could not be sent. These emails all seem to be directed to companies and my name is used. Is somebody using my account? If so what do I do about it?
All Replies (4)
Get out of AOL mail! Run for your life!
Seriously, try Gmail instead and download the Add-ons from Firefox called Google redesigned and ad-block plus which both make GMail tolerable and actually pretty good. The only SPAM I get on Gmail is from some Canadian Pharmacy company that somehow got my address and uses it to send me SPAM (ie it appears to originate from my account so very hard for GMail to eliminate completely but they do put it in the SPAM folder).
AOL is so riddled and its emails with adware, spyware, malware, etc. its intolerable.
It is possible that nobody is accessing your email account. What may be happening is a spammer is using email spoofing to make it appear the emails are coming from your account. There is nothing you can do to stop the email spoofing.
What "Quarantine" is saying is what is happening with my Gmail account, ie email spoofing. IE I appear to be sending the email to myself. GMail knows this though and at least sends it to the junk mail folder.
Your issue though sound more to me like someone is sending multiple emails sometime during each day, probably using your email address book it seems. If they were sending bulk mail, AOL would shut them down, IE shut down your AOL account and you would have to call to determine why. Since that is not happening, my guess is they are sending something, perhaps, using your address book and the rejection notifications are those people in your address book that do not have valid addresses anymore. The other issue might be that some companies send out automated rejection notifications of emails that they think might be suspicious so that it they are from a SPAMMER they will remove the address from their SPAM list. I have a friend whose work "rejected" emails from me for over a year even though he said he got every one of them.
If it were email spoofing, they would be trying to sell you something.
I'll go back to my first solution, Get a GMail account.
I would like to make another comment on top of the above: do not use your email address as your user name in any public forums.
That's how most spammers get the email addresses from these forums so they can send out bulk spams. My company advertises on Craigslist a lot (my ad includes a link to our website which has our email address in it) and every time I advertise there, spam mails start coming in. After a week or so, they stop. And will restart again next time I advertise.