How can I stop spam which is sending to all contacts in address book?

Something is sending spam to all my contacts in my address book. How do I stop this?

• I am also receiving it from my contacts whom have no idea it's been sent.

• Answer:

  (Sorry it's a long answer, but it's complicated question/solution.) Deleting your account or Contacts List will NOT stop this spam - once the spammers have the address, they will continue to use it for a while. Spam sent to your Contacts will also stop in a while, but it is annoying. Yahoo's advice is to change your password, but there is more to do than just that. The ones you receive from your contacts mean they too opened spam and their accounts were compromized. 1. Check that the alternate e-mail address is still yours, under Options, Mail Options, Account Information, then change it! (so the hacker will not be notified of the change). Then change both your password AND your secret questions and answers. Make them unique and long, strong ones with mixed characters! (*** Changing your password also deletes the cookie which apparently inserts that sly trojan address grabber. ***) If you used this password for other accounts, change them too - make every one different. Make the password longer than 8 characters, with mixed symbols. Usually, this is all you need to do, although mail will still be sent in the name of the old account for a while. For a Yahoo account, you can change your password at https://edit.yahoo.com/config/change_pw. If you can no longer access your account, you can get a new password at https://edit.yahoo.com/forgotroot/. 2. *** If spam mail was sent to any of your contacts, apologize, and notify all your contacts NOT to open e-mails from that address, especially those with no subject, and definitely not to click any links. Warn them to scan for malware too, just in case. Set up an alternate 'alias' account to use instead. This allows you to use a different address for sending, but still keep all saved mails and contacts and the first address active too for incoming mail. Your friends can trust this new address. (There is a choice of address in an arrow in the From: box.) http://edit.yahoo..com/config/list_alias (alternate address) (Ribbit) 3. Just to be very sure your computer is not infected, run both an anti-virus and spyware/malware scans, updated and separately - even more than one malware scan, or Trend Micro's Housecall for an online a-v scan. (in 'Safe Mode with Networking' is the only truly effective method - click F8 repeatedly when the screen first lights on boot-up, then arrow keys and Enter to navigate.) Re-boot into Safe Mode for each separate scan. These are the best free anti-malware programs. http://housecall.trendmicro.com/ http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free http://www.superantispyware.com/ (Ribbit)