This has me both stumped and extremely ticked off.
Yesterday I sent three email messages, one of which was very sensitive and private.
Shortly afterward a friend calls me to say that she received the sensitive message. However, this message wasn’t intended for her. This I could accept as my mistake in addressing the message.
But when I went back into Yahoo Mail to check the address I found something very curious: All three messages I had sent were now in my TRASH box. They appeared as messages I had sent, with my name in the sender line. Even more curious, the sensitive message in the trash box was listed as having been forwarded to me.
Further investigation reveals the following:
The intended recipient of the sensitive message didn’t forward the message to my friend.
The other two messages do not appear to have been forwarded to anyone.
Even if someone HAD forwarded the messages to embarrass me, how would they have turned up in my TRASH box? I screeen messages carefully, and I definitely didn’t view them and put them in the trash.
My first reaction was that this sounded a lot like a virus fiddling with my address book. But this is precisely what net-based email prevents, isn’t it?
Has anyone seen anything like this before in Yahoo Mail or other net-based email system?
This sounds very freaky - I am sure you have already considered this but you don’t say so in your email, so I thought it worth mentioning - could anyone else have accessed your email? Is there any chance it was hacked either on your computer or a remote one?
Given that it’s webmail, all someone would need was the password. If others have access to your computer I suggest downloading and running a spyware scanner to check there isn’t a keystroke logger or something.
I would also suggest contacting Yahoo! about this as soon as possible.
Thanks for responding Istara. The first thing I did was change my password. But I doubt that I have been hacked.
Even assuming someone (A) wanted to hack me and cause problems, and (B) had my password, why would they leave a trail by putting the messages in my trash folder? Even if they wanted to do that, it would take about four deliberate steps. There’s no reason.
So despite the fact I was embarrassed and this looks like an opportunistic hack superficially, everything else points to a strange computer hiccup. So I will be calling Yahoo about it.
This is the weirdest thing that’s happened to me in ages. I’ve used Yahoo Mail for years and have never had problems. Recently they changed their system somewhat, so I wonder if that could have something to do with it.