Most of the times when we get emails from someone here, it's not that their account was actually hacked, it's more like spoofed. What that means is someone gets the address book, from here or the individual and then sends the messages, by tricking the servers into putting a fake return address on them. It's less and less common now than it was a few years ago.

This BB won't let me sign up with my Prodigy address, I suspect because that's actually Yahoo now and Yahoo is often the source of the above type of spoofed emails. Thus blocked or blacklisted by many places. It was funny to see last month that Yahoo announced they were patching a flaw in the email software, that allowed spoofed addresses. Not like it was news that they had a problem all these years?

Anyway, easy enough if someone gets a bunch of bounced messages, from their own email account, it's a good sign that someone just used it. Change your password as a precaution.

The other scam that most of us have seen in the past few years is the "I'm stuck in (foreign country) I was robbed and lost my wallet and credit cards. Please send money so I can get home." Of course it's send to a Western Union station, where you can kiss the money good-bye. Part of the trick on that one is again stealing someones address book, but the hook is a similar name, or identical account name, with a different mail client. JimJones@mymail becomes JimJones@ThisMail - and many people won't see that, yes it's your friends name and account, but wrong mailbox.

Some will transpose one letter or replace an i with and e so it looks right.

Anyway, if your friend suddenly gets robbed overseas and needs money, you might phone them to write to everyone they know and say, they are at home and fine?

Cause, one of them: 3. Email addresses used as logons: You know how many websites have you set up an account using your email address as your User ID? If you then use the same password for that account that you use for email, criminals have what they need: your email address and your password.