General tech help for rogue emails

[Wiggy]

Hello,

I have received a couple of emails from a member of our church - except they are not.  I rang him to warn him - he said he'd not had any news of it from anyone else,  - 'thanks for the warning but there is nothing he can do about it!'

Someone else is sending me emails from an address my computer isn't recognising.  And I have had a third person's name from church also - that happened for a while, then stopped, and has now started again.

It is their emails/computers which have been compromised . . .or mine?  (I am not tech savvy really - in case you hadn't guessed.)

Wiggy

[candleflame]

I had one of those last week Wiggy. It was quite a vague email asking for my help but with nothing personal on it - so it began Hi . This gentleman was of an age he'd never use the word hi at the beginning of a letter or email and he'd have always said
 good morning candle as his opening line. There was no mention of my name. In addition the ending just said thanks, no thanks David or any other name, so the sender clearly didn't know the name of the senders email and their email they normally used was made up of their initials, no Christian name  so scammers wouldn't know their first name or the name they usually used. It  was supposedly from someone I used to work with but I'd deleted their email address from my contact list. I'm guessing he hadn't deleted my address from his contact list and it's his email that's been hacked. I just deleted it .

[Wiggy]

Thanks CF - I have just been deleting these too - but have started to wonder who'se computer is being 'got at'.   

Tricky isn't it!   

[Gadget]

Is it their name that shows up but the e-mail address is not theirs and/or one you don't recognise?

If so, mark as spam and block sender.  Hovering over the  sender name ,as you know, will show the real address.

I have a few of those in my bt e-mails  but very few in my other ones.

[F1fan]

Is it their name that shows up but the e-mail address is not theirs and/or one you don't recognise?

If so, mark as spam and block sender.  Hovering over the  sender name ,as you know, will show the real address.

I have a few of those in my bt e-mails  but very few in my other ones.

As Gadget states, if it is from a different email address, then would be a scam / phishing email and so don't click on any links that might be in it, just mark as junk and delete it.

If it does appear to come from the friends email address, a safe option as well is to ask the person to change their password for the email account and then if it has been ' hacked ' that should help to stop any further access, but make sure the recovery email / details have not been changed on the account to something else first.

[waynenort]

Scam emails are a real problem, especially if the email system being used has security vulnerabilities. In other words the scammer may either be able to capture an email address from your address book or from another email account's address book.  And then they fake to be one of those email addresses.

I had similar issues quite a few years ago with a Hotmail and then a Yahoo email account. So I ended up switching to Gmail and really beefed up my password . Touch wood, I've been ok since. Plus Gmail has a good firewall system to weed out publishing scammers, and either blocks them or sends them to the junk folder.

[Wiggy]

Thanks everyone.     

The other two go straight to junk/spam now and I hope any fruther from this one will also.   Interesting -    The problem now is, if this bloke  (the one I DO know) sends me anything it could well go to spam.  I will just have to keep on my toes and watch.     

thanks for you comments.

Wiggy