Gmail account hacked...

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Thought I'd pass on a top tip a got a few years ago. As most email virus's? enter your computer unknown I was told to set up a false email address in my contacts book. If the "virus" tries to contact your addresses a message will appear in your inbox stating that the message to your false address has failed thus you'll know something is untoward. Hope that made sense
A great idea! My ISP automatically drops all delivery failures so I'd never receive it but as a slight modification to that you could set your outbound e-mail address to be [email protected] or something and the only e-mail address in the book could be [email protected]

That would have the same effect I suppose!
 
2. you have malware on your machine that used your address book or skimmed your password

I've certainly heard of a number of instances of this sort of thing over the past year or so.

My guess is the above is the typical cause.

Spammers have got hold of multiple address, probably from an email containing them on a compromised machine, and then the email can be sent with a genuine FROM address to make it look real but of course isn't.

Usually, the emails apparently sent to all your contacts don't actually contain all of them.

I looked into this on behalf of someone and signed in to her Yahoo mail account. The email was showing the full SMTP email address. However, after looking at another email she had also from the same person, the address this time was the Yahoo username alone, and not the whole SMTP address which meant it was sent internally via Yahoo, and the other from the outside world (outside of Yahoo).

In my experience, most of the accounts have not been compromised and a change of password to a stronger one as a precaution is probably the best course of action.

Where I've known of an account being compromised, the password was changed so the genuine person could not get in. Then ensues proving the genuine 'owner'.

For this and a number of other reasons, I would not recommend anyone host email on their own computer (use a web-based email instead) unless they really know what they are doing or really want to.
 
No IMAP email scanning in AVG free. Sounds like you've been compromised.
 

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