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All of a sudden e-mails are being sent to everybody in my e-mail address book for strange things like viagra and stuff without our knowledge. We have two laptops both with windows 7 and both with McAfee SecurityCenter software. I have run the software on both laptops a couple times and it never finds any viruses or anything. Can someone tell what I can do to stop whatever is sending e-mails?
The emails are in your sent mail folder?
If not, it could actually be a virus on their machine, choosing you as the sender of the e-mail with them as the recipient.
Not that it can't be you as well, but there's a few new tricks that spammers are using.
The latest is putting the recipients e-mail in the sender field, so when it gets rejected by the ISP spam filter is actually gets directed back to the sender, which means it actually gets delivered.
In your case, you are a known contact for them, so they are more likely to open an e-mail from you (or it's more likely to get through their spam filter).
Could be a lot of things.
McAfee is garbage, I'd dump that in a heart beat... Try MalwareBytes AntiMalware and see if it finds anything. After that, try Lavasoft AdAware and or Spybot Search and Destroy, although you probably won't need those after a good MalwareBytes scan.
Yes they show up in my sent folder that is how I found out. It just started a couple weeks ago and they seem to show up in my sent folder every fews days.
Thanks for the other suggestions for other software I will check those out.
Is it possible that someone hacked your account? Have you tried changing your password?
I just did, didn't think of that. Thanks.:)
That happened to me and it turned out someone had hacked my account I had to change the password to something more secure
You may also want to go to microsofts website and run their scan (it free).
I have done it and has found a number of things that McAfee did not find.
Good luck!