25 June, 2009

What to do If your contacts receive spams from your Gmail ID?


Recently one of my friend told me that his gmail ID was sending spam to all his contacts.After doing some research I reached to the conclusion that he was a victim of spoofing i.e.. those spams were faking the address to hide the real origin of the mail.


Here are the steps to follow if your contacts start pinching you for sending them spams :

  1. Check whether the copy of mails received by your contacts is there in your sent item folder or not,if not then your gmail "account" might has not been used for sending mails and you may be a victim of spoofing.


  2. Check the Recent Activity report (which is given at the bottom ,third last line, of the gmail window ) click details and point out unfamiliar IPs.

  3. This all might be a case of phishing you may have typed your password and email id on a phishing web site OR,

  4. might have given access to your contact list to some website by telling your password and ID


  5. Scan your computer for malware by Lavasoft Ad-Aware: http://www.lavasoft.com/products/ad-aware_se_personal.php OR- Spybot Search and Destroy: http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html (as suggested by google) because the bot might be in your own PC.

  6. Change your password. Choose a strong password which is hard to be guessed ,use a password strength checker like this .


  7. You may also report your problem to gmail's help forum .


  8. See gmail's help about this at http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=50200 and http://groups.google.com/group/Gmail-Help-Message-Delivery-en/browse_thread/thread/e5c554347f7f3221

Hope all this works for you

2 Comments:

himanshu srivastava said...

thanks for the information.

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