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Spam email sent from my account

9

9erdog

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 26, 2011
2
0
I just got and set up my new iMac (first Apple - PC convert) last night. I tested it out by going online and using my Yahoo! email account. Woke up this morning and found out that all of my contacts had received phising email that raved about a website that they should visit. Each one was different. I subsequently sent out emails to all my contacts telling them not to click on the link and to delete the emails. I also changed the password on my Yahoo! email account. I have never had this happen on all of the PCs I have used.

Another guy at work got an iMac a week or so ago and had the same thing happen a couple of days after he started using it. He has set up several email accounts but only the first was affected. He asked a computer savvy friend of his to check out the iMac and they found no viruses or malware involved.

Before anyone asks, I only went through the initial setup on the machine and did not click on any MacDefender or similar install requests. Also I did not set up the account on the Mail application, I accesses the mail from Safari. My friend used the Mail application and his account was with AOL.

Anyone else experience this? Any thoughts on if I should be worried of any further events?

By the way - I love, love, love the machine. It took longer to get it out of the box than getting it up and running - never had that experience with a Windows machine.

Thanks in advance for any help.
 
Your email account was hacked, nothing more. No malware of any kind was needed and your iMac was not involved in any way. Changing your password to a secure one is all you need to do. No viruses exist in the wild that can run on Mac OS X, and there never have been any, since it was released 10 years ago. The handful of trojans that exist can be easily avoided with some basic education, common sense and care in what software you install:
 
The exact same thing happened to my wife the other day with her email account; however, this did not happen with her mac. It's a terrible when it happens but to put it simply it is just a coincidence.
 
Thanks

Thanks fellow Rumors denizens. Appreciate the quick responses. I pride myself on being quite careful of these types of things and so found it peculiar that it happened. I do also have a gmail account and may look into switching out. I changed password right away as well so hopefully this ends here.
 
miles01110 said:
Yahoo is a haven for spammers. Their corporate security is lax, and there is not one aspect of their e-mail service that GMail doesn't do better (including account security). The way to solve your problem is to not use Yahoo.
Click to expand...

None of them are safe. It's important to change your password every so often, and make it difficult to guess.
 
I recently noticed that I've been getting spam email sent to my 'me.com' email account.

The sad part is that the only entity that I've disclosed my 'me.com' email address is Apple.
:confused:
 
Eduardo1971 said:
I recently noticed that I've been getting spam email sent to my 'me.com' email account.

The sad part is that the only entity that I've disclosed my 'me.com' email address is Apple.
:confused:
Click to expand...

Apple doesn't need to sell your email.

Spammers can guess emails, or someone you emailed to had a compromised account.
 
Consultant said:
Apple doesn't need to sell your email.

Spammers can guess emails, or someone you emailed to had a compromised account.
Click to expand...

I never stated that Apple sold my email addy.

I have never emailed anyone from my 'me.com' address. The only logical conclusion that I came up with is that some 'bot managed to guess my email.
 
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