Am I sleepwalking

just to see what you peeps think I should do about this.

i have two email accounts, both hotmail (yeah I know) one i use for general stuff and the other which is only divulged to very close friends.

first i received an email telling me someone was trying to make a payment to me through paypal. it was for my very personal account which i don't have a paypal account set up under. it seemed as though i'd sold something and was being paid for it and when i checked with paypal they said it was a genuine transaction and the best thing to do was email the guy and sort it out with him, as to what was going on. i did but received no reply.

then i get a message from someone answering a question i had sent to an auction site regarding goldfish, which i'm sorry to say are of no interest to me at all.
i emailed him to ask if he had sent it to the wrong guy, but he insists i sent him the query.

Am i sleepwalking, or is somebody using my email address? how can i find out? is it worth the bother? is he getting my emails? i changed my account password, but will that do anything?

Finally, i know this isn't the right forum, but i didn't know where else to post it and everybody here is so helpful.

Thanks

And21

 

It's Hotmail...that's all you need to know.

Frankly, with free options like Gmail and FastMail and others available, I don't know why people even bother with Hotmail, unless it's to use the account as a site sign-up spam vault. Hotmail, Yahoo mail, AOL mail, etc. are, IMO, spam magnets. And the security and privacy of accounts of that type is almost nonexistant.

 

glad i gave you a laugh star 17, but it doesn't seem that fastmail is immune from spamming and "header forging" and do i really want every email i write or receive stored with google forever in gmail?

hotmail works for me, although it would appear my hotmail is working for somebody else now as well, lol.

 

You don't have to keep everything with gmail, it's just like hotmail but more storage for those that need it - brilliant I've found and can offer you an invite if need be.

 

I have yet to have a single peice of spam in either my hotmail or AOL account,not one!,not even one in the spam vault,in fact I'v never had one peice of spam yet in my life!

I'm actually looking forward to getting my first spam email so I know what everyone else is talking about

 

Don't see where I was laughing.

Also not saying the other mail services I mentioned were perfect, just less of an annoyance when compared to Hotmail. And I personally think the gmail storage fallacy is way over done.

If someone wants to bad enough, anyone's email from any type of service, even through your ISP, can be compromised. As long as there are those fascinated by the challenge, these types of things will happen.

The three services I mentioned were to emphasize a point: they are the most widely used ,thus the greatest target by sheer numbers. The first personal email I ever had was a hotmail account; I used for 1 month and signed up to 4 news websites and that's it, and eight years later, it still gets spammed; 3,177 in the inbox last time I peeked.

 

when you read fast enough, IMO can look a lot like lMAO star, so apologies from me.

not sure about gmail, so if i can take you up on your offer that would be good mcadam, cheers! although it does sound a bit blue-sky to me, i'll give it a try and let people know what i think.

but how do i find out what's going on with the hotmail account and should i be worried?

 

No problem

See if this help you with your concerns:

http://www.hotmail.msn.com/cgi-bin/dasp/ua_info.asp

 

PM sent to you And21ob

 

Hey, I can't please everyone

Is your email address easily mis-spelt, or similar to any other name? For example, if I were to have an email address goldfish@hotmail.com (which I don't) then if I misspelt my email address when sending it to another site golddish@hotmail.com (which belongs to someone else) - then the other user would get the emails meant for me.

It is always possible someone went scanning for valid email addresses @hotmail.com, and happened across yours (beginning with an A?) so used that as a fake address for some query or another.

 

send me your email address and I can sign you up

 

Hey goldfish, it may be that someone has a similar email address, but that means that they are mistyping it themselves, which is pretty damn sloppy on their part.

I've raised it with msn and i'll wait to see what they say, though i'm not holding out much hope after seeing their "help". Thanks for the link star17.

I've pm'd my addy to you mcadam, thanks for the offer Rikky.