Will transferring email contacts from one account to another remove them from the original account?

My account has a spam virus. How can I remove it and protect my email contacts from receiving this junk mail?

• I send a simple hello email..when the person receives it there is a like at the bottom of the page that I did not attach when I orginally sent the email...Please advise...I am not sending this junk to my friends and family...Should I just close my present yahoo account????

• Answer:

  A spammer probably has your password, which is usually obtained with phishing spam. The spammer may be sending out spam from your account. A spam message may have been entered into your signature. That will be on any email you send until you clean it out. You should change your password. While you are in your account settings check for tampering with your alternate email contact address. A spammer could use that to obtain new passwords. Changing the password or the alternate email address has a step in which you must re-enter your password. That prevents a malicious script from changing those settings without actually knowing the password. There are malicious scripts that can do things to logged-in webmail which do not have that step in the way. That includes tampering with a signature and harvesting an address book. So it is possible that the tampering that has occurred was done by the malicious link in a spam having been clicked from within logged-in webmail.