Anyone experience this before?  It's happening on a Yahoo Mail account.

All these delivery failure notices are from mail I supposedly sent to people I haven't contacted in a long time: my mother's address for an old job ... a Army recruiter.

What the heck is going on?

What should I do about it?

Change your password, now.

Seriously. Somehow they got it and are sending emails from your account. Changing your password takes care.of it.

yep.

congratulations, you've been hacked.

Not necessarily.  Spammers take people's email addresses and put them in the From name.  An email that looks like it comes from a real person or someone that sounds familiar is more likely to be read.  No access to the email account is necessary to send out fake emails.

+1. More likely they got your contact list and are sending out emails with a forged From or Reply-To header from their own servers (or hijacked servers). Doubtful they're actually sending it from Yahoo's servers.





 

It is likely that it was hacked. My inbox was getting flooded with bounced emails to people on my contact list that I hadnt spoken to in years, whose email addresses had expired. Password change solved the problem

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yeah just make the email as SPAM and delete them.  Do not open any attachments.



 

I've been getting spam email on my Yahoo acct. from UPS, Fed Ex and USPS saying something about a package delivery, I didn't order anything or send anything.

I got one on my Yahoo account from "UPS" last week.....did not open it

The only delivery you'll receive if you open one of those email's is a computer virus.

FACT:  Email is like mailing a letter at the post office- you can write whatever you want for a return address.

If the failure notices are coming back to you about email addresses you recognize (which it appears in your case they are) - you've been owned.  If they're random and you don't recognize any of the addresses, then I wouldn't worry about it.

Used to hear this all the time when I worked phones for an ISP.

Yes, change your password, it's never a bad idea to do so, but the odds are it's just a spammer forging a "FROM" address as mentioned.

Spammers send to enormous lists of addresses, a great many of which are not legit or active addresses.  Each email sent to a bad address generates a bounce reply.  If they use their own address, the replies will take them down.  Instead, they use a constantly changing set of false "FROM" addresses, both to give their emails some hint of legitimacy, and to redirect the bounces.

The problem is that your inbox is going to fill up with garbage, and the only way to stop it is to ask some scumbag scammer spammer asshole very politely to use another address.  Either you or your mail admin could cook something up that disposes of them automatically, but that's more just a band aid.

Usually they move on to a new victim in short order, but I've heard of some folks who had ongoing problems that were not solved except by abandoning the affected address.

I had this happen to me. I tried several different virus programs, etc, and nothing worked until I changed my password.

I do believe my e-mail account was hacked as the e-mails were sent to people in my address book, not to random strangers. If it was just the spammers faking the "from" header, why would the e-mails have only gone to people in my address book?

Changing my password fixed it completely, right away.