Can I stop my email from being spoofed?

[Pix]

The last couple of days or so an email addy of mine that I almost never use anymore has been getting returns of undeliverable email for what appears to be mostly the same spam (with files), and one of those I looked at claimed it was blocked from their site as they detected a lot of unsolicited spam from him/it using my account.

My other email addies aren't being spoofed and I don't know why this one I only rarely use is. I recently made it public to someone who wanted to get in touch with me (asking that it be deleted when she got it which she did within 24 hours of my posting it) and it's my guess that my email addy was grabbed recently while publicly viewable.

I find this annoying, and I hate spammers like that. Is there any way I can stop this? :confused:

[pellaz]

i had a bad yahoo account and all i did was change the password and it all went away, easy as that

[Sceak]

You can set a rule that the messages following a certain format get automatically deleted.

[Bowyn Aerrow]

It's not the address, its the password you need to concern yourself with.

If you have an email account where you can 'accidentally' input a wrong password over and over again without it freezing up, or the site telling you to wait, or contact tech support whatever. Then that is an email site that can readily be 'hacked' with various unsophisticated 'fishing' software. That software simply tries combination after combination of password until it hits the right one.

A good standard for cobbling together a password is to keep it 6+ charters long, at least one character should be a capitol, and at least one should be a numeral.

I use compound words such as fuzzyBiohazard. These two words are not commonly found together, unlike brownBear.

I often insert a number in place of a letter. Thus fuzzyBi0hazard. or Br0wnB3ar.

This doesn't make your password unbreakable, it just makes it much harder for unsophisticated software to piece together potential passwords.

Most people stick to 'simple' combinations or just simple words. They use parts of their telephone number, or a birth year coupled with the name of their dog. Thus mine under that formula would be Sirius66 - this is a real easy code to break especially if anyone looks at my Facebook account and notices my dog's name is Sirius and I was born in 1966.

I also use random name generators: http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/ - a random fantasy name generator. I find a name I like, then muck with it, replacing letters with numbers, even changing the spelling.

I went through a spate of using the Vulcan Dictionary: http://www.starbase-10.de/vld/

Again I 'spruced up' the words substituting numbers for letters, changing the spelling.

I used to be a real Password Nazi and changed my passwords every last Friday of the month. Now I do it once or twice a year or when I suspect that my email or an account has been compromised.

I keep a list of passwords I have used and am using and will use in a notebook - a paper notebook, one I wrote with a pen - NOT on the computer. I have about 3 pages of seemingly random words and numbers. I keep it in order to write down new passwords I may think up, and to keep track of ones I used before so I won't mistakenly reuse them in the near future.

[Pix]

Thanks all. I'll try that.

[zeon]

i would recommend maybe downloading zone alarm can be a giggle when u get their IP address... If you know what your doing like an old friend of mine did once.... everytime he was hacked a little friendly "gift" was sent to them and i dont think they did it twice