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A question about yahoo mail.

Posted: 2002-11-09 12:33am
by Anarchist Bunny
My mom is having a disput with another person on a contract(she wants 20%) and recently she got a blank email in her bulk mail from this person titled ACCESSKEY and she's freaking out since she uses the address for business, I know e-mails like that often have back doors and tricks to gain access to others e-mail accounts, and was wonder if this was a taletale sign of it.

Posted: 2002-11-09 12:34am
by Dalton
Sounds more like a case of Klez.

Re: A question about yahoo mail.

Posted: 2002-11-09 10:14am
by greenmm
anarchistbunny wrote:My mom is having a disput with another person on a contract(she wants 20%) and recently she got a blank email in her bulk mail from this person titled ACCESSKEY and she's freaking out since she uses the address for business, I know e-mails like that often have back doors and tricks to gain access to others e-mail accounts, and was wonder if this was a taletale sign of it.
Sounds more like the person she's been working with has an email virus.

I'm assuming, though, that your mom is the one with the Yahoo! email account, correct?

If your mom is the one with the Yahoo! email account, then I don't think she has anything to really worry about. It's been my experience that Yahoo! and most other web-based email services are much more secure against email viruses and hacks. That doesn't mean they're foolproof, obviously, but the you have a lot less to worry about with them.

Even if your mom isn't the one with the Yahoo! account, though, I'm thinking this is one of 2 things:

1) The other person has been hit with an email virus, and your mom's email address was in their address book, so it was forwarded to her by the virus.

2) They're a really vindictive piece of shit that is trying to screw with your mom's email account by trying to either send her a virus or try to steal her password -- the latter being particularly nasty, since with the password they can then change it to whatever they want, block your mom's access, read/delete all her emails, and/or send faux emails out to try and get your mom in trouble.

I hope she went ahead and deleted the email. If she's really worried, though, have her change her email password to something new, as a precaution.

Posted: 2002-11-09 10:24am
by salm
besides changing the password she should also change the secret question which you´re asked if you forgot the password.