Gmail sending out to emails that I did not do.

[Meaghan McLeod 179664]

I got an email that was different then normal. Instead of deleting it, I opened it. Now it seems that I am sending out emails that I DID NOT SEND. Help how do I get it to stop?

[Midnite-Energies 110563]

Sounds like you caught a virus by opening the email and now it's mailing for you. I would do a virus scan on your machine and see what gets picked up.

[Meaghan McLeod 179664]

It's on my phone. Can I do a scan. Samsung s4

[Guest N***he**Ont**y]

Go to my Playbook on your S4 where you will find AVG Mobile Anti Virus app and download it and then set it up. It will scan your phone and hopefully gets rid of your virus. It will prompt you for updates from time to time. I use this app on my Samsung S3.

[Guest S*rca****sid]

Don't forget to reset the password for your gmail account and it might be a good idea to reset any passwords that your phone accesses.

[Meaghan McLeod 179664]

Thank you everyone. I found the download, installed a anti virus and changed passwords.

 

Sorry to everyone I might have sent an email to.

[fr33yay0 1172]

Biggest issue here is changing passwords, but you have done that! :)

[Guest S*rca****sid]

Biggest issue here is changing passwords, but you have done that! :smile:

 

Whether or not she changed her password, if the virus is not removed, the virus could potentially get her password. She could change her password a 100 times and it could still get it with a key logger.

[Boomer 33202]

I am a bit leary about viruses on phones. I think to solve a problem like this I would probably do a hard reset on my phone and then restore the data from my backup.

 

One of the reasons for my approach, is that things like this are synced from the originating email account, and I suspect that the virus is more likely to be a problem on your laptop or computer.

[backrubman 64800]

It's a pretty safe bet that the phone wasn't doing the sending, so likely the password for the account was compromised, the email contacts harvested and the account then used for sending spam (as Google does not allow unauthenticated sending).

 

Gmail is immune to this problem if you use Google Authenticator's 2-Step verification and all SPs that use Gmail (or Google Apps with their own domain name) should really make the very little effort to do this considering the confidentiality their clients expect of them. You then have to enter the one-time password generated by the Authenticator App (or one of 10 printed backup - in case you loose your phone - one time passwords) only once every 30 days on a computer you use every day or each time you access your e-mail on a computer you don't normally. Key stroke loggers are completely defeated when it comes to compromising your password. It's what I do and it is no inconvenience at all.

 

Reusable passwords are so 16th century.

[Phantom 5310]

Meaghan,

 

You might not have a virus. May I ask what email you saw that said it looked like you were sending out emails?

 

The reason I ask is that there are spammers that use fake "From" addresses to fool all the blacklists out there. Essentially they randomly grab "[email protected]" and can trick the email systems receiving the email to think the email came from it. What happens is after using one for too long the email gets associated with spam and then gets on a blacklist.

 

Once on a blacklist, some systems will email the sender saying something like" This email account has been tagged as being spam...blah blah blah... and that your email was returned. When in fact "you" never sent it. They dont need your account password nor did it ever get sent from your account. It would be like putting your friends name in the top left corner of a regular mail enveloppe and the postman doing a return to sender bringing it to him rather than you.

 

There is unfortunaltey no fix for this, because changing the password does not stop them.

 

If you send me the wording in the email that let you think you were sending something out that "you" hadn't I can tell you for sure.

 

Additional Comments:

The thng to look for is if it is in your gmail outbox or not. If it is then yes they had access to your account , if it's not they "may" not have and it might be the fake "from" issue I mentioned. (virus could be smart enough to clear itself from outbox as well so not a guarantee if it's not there).

[backrubman 64800]

...The reason I ask is that there are spammers that use fake "From" addresses to fool all the blacklists out there. Essentially they randomly grab "[email protected]" and can trick the email systems receiving the email to think the email came from it. ...

 

That used to be much more common and more often the case (and hopefully the case here) but since DKIM and SPF (e.g. DMARC) now 9 times out of 10 the account was actually compromised when this happens.

[fr33yay0 1172]

Whether or not she changed her password, if the virus is not removed, the virus could potentially get her password. She could change her password a 100 times and it could still get it with a key logger.

 

This is on her phone, it's rare... most likely spyware and not a virus.

[backrubman 64800]

.... Shortly after I noticed emails on my outbox I hadn't sent....

 

I doubt that the emails were sent from the phone; it's much more likely the account was comprised and then used to send the emails from somewhere else in the world.

 

This can happen again and again until people stop using reusable passwords, and it's so dead easy with Gmail to stop using passwords and never have this problem again I can't understand why people don't do it.