When your email is hacked.

My oldest email account was hacked a few weeks ago sending spam to all of my contacts. ALL of my contacts. Every person/email address I deemed important enough to save as a contact since the time I created the account in 2002.

The first person to notify me was a friend from high school, who, thanks to facebook we're 'friends'. Though, funnily enough, she texted me and I didn't have her number stored. So my first thought was it was a hoax/part of the scam. Nope.

The next day I heard from the recruiter at my company who I'd corresponded with a few years ago in applying for my current job. Ugh. And shortly after that, I received another half dozen forwards that looked something like this:

Hey Lany,

Not sure if you knew this, but your hotmail is sending out this message. It looked odd to me, is it legit?

And some even continued to say 'I tried to click the link, too.'

PEOPLE:
1) Don't forward me spam.
2) DON'T CLICK THE LINK.
3) Offer a possible solution.

Since my now preferred email address was also saved as one of my contacts, I received the spam messages, all 5 or so of them. (I never clicked the link.)

Here's a rundown of who I think got the spam:

- Craigslist people from whom I bought furniture
- The Clark Alumni Association
- People who responded to my own craigslist adds for rugby recruitment
- My grandparents' email address, which goes unchecked now
- Guys I used to correspond with from match.com and jdate.com when I lived in upstate NY
- And perhaps women I've corresponded with more recently (recently as in 3 years ago) also from match.com

I've now changed my password, deleted all the stored contacts, and closed the email account.

My next project is clearing out my gmail contacts. All 500+ of them.