How to stop an email from someone?

How can I stop someone who has broken into my address book from sending out emails using my email address ?

• To Yahoo, Recently I sent out 50-60 emails from my address book. I was told by all of the senders that each email also included a message (which I did not write or authorize) that included a link. Many of the links were to pharmaceutical companies advertising products such as Viagra. Most if not all included "malware" warnings if the links were opened up in the computers that received the emails. Last week another batch of emails were sent out using my email address. This time the emails did not include any messages from me but just included links to the sites mentioned above. In other words I never sent out any of these emails myself. I feel that my address book and email address have been compromised and that my password and email address have been stolen by someone for their own personal use. I asked people to send me back the emails that I initially sent them so that I could see who the links were to. In each case I was unable to actually open up the links. Below is a copy of one of the links that was attached to my emails. http://noithathungthinh.com/PDGjlzZZCV.html I called Yahoo and could not speak to anyone in Security but instead spoke to a customer care representative in your billing department. She said that the only thing I could do was to change the email address or password or both. Is this correct or do I need to take any additional measures in order to stop this ? Thanks, Wesley

• Answer:

  RUN, don't walk to set up a new account, quickly, and warn all your contacts from your new account. Congratulations on being among the many recently 'harvested' by a powerful spam bot network. (It could have been worse - one is begging for money because you have been robbed in a foreign country.) The best articles I have ever read on e-mail hacked accounts were by Leo Notenbloom, a longtime computer guru newsletter site. It's well worth reading an article or two, especially before you set up that new account you need!