My email account is sending spam amails to my contacts. Do I have a virus
It is more likely that instead of your Mac having a virus that your email account has been hacked. Try changing the password.
Are you actually running a vversion of OS X that is 10.3 or older? If so that is 10 year old code.
Allan
Curious.... keep hearing the mantra over and over and over that it cannot come from the iPhone.
But...
Around 5AM this morning emails started leaving my yahoo mail to everyone in my address book. I went to my pc and opened Yahoo mail and had a message that something was going on and I should change my email address. I did.
Next, I went into my iPhone and turned off all email accounts except for one... a family Gmail account. Now I see message failures in my iPhone mail showing where my Gmail account is trying to forward the messages I got from Yahoo showing changes to my account.
Sure smells like it's coming from my iPhone 4S. Not sure how it could be otherwise.
thoughts?
I'm not sure that I understand your description of what is happening, but nothing you have said indicates that anything is happening on the phone itself. If your GMail account is now sending spam, the most likely explanation for that is that the hackers used information gleaned from their access to your Yahoo account to hack your GMail account.
Ok... I'll try to explain better.
Around 5AM this morning my phone starting alerting for messages. These were coming in as text. Showed where texts had been sent from my phone to email addresses. I picked up the phone, tried to figure out what was going on with no luck from a groggy brain. As I closed text, I noticed that my email icon showed 94 messages (was at 2 the night before). Opened email and to my chagrine, discovered that they were all message failures from my Yahoo account to lots of people in my addresss book... maybe all since many were group messages.
Next, I went to my PC, logged in to Yahoo mail and was immediately hit with a request from them to change my email login password as they had noticed suspicous activity from my account. I did. Nothing else I could really do there so I shut down.
Went back to my phone and just for the heck of it, shut down every email account on the phone except for a family gmail account. A few minutes later, I notice that the gmail account (only one I did NOT close on my phone) is trying to forward the confirmation emails I just got from Yahoo about changing my password out to addresses in my contacts.
Seems to me this HAS to be coming from the phone. Way, way too big of a coincidence that the only account I left running started sending emails without my permission.
Did that explanation make better sense?
That still does not sound like a problem with the phone. Do you use the same password for your GMail account as for the Yahoo account? If so, the hackers are now in your GMail account. Even if you don't, the hackers probably got enough information from your Yahoo account that they were able to hack your GMail account. That sort of thing happens all the time. Consider the now-infamous case of Mat Honan, whose Amazon account was hacked, which gave the information needed to hack his Apple ID, and from there his entire online identity fell.
Your mention of your phone sending texts to e-mail addresses seems to be a bit in passing, and I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but if your phone was actually showing texts being sent by the Messages app, probably your iCloud account has been hacked as well and you're seeing messages that were sent from another device synced onto your phone.
You need to change every password for every online account you possess, ASAP!
I sort of understand your thinking and please.... absolutely no disrespect intended, Apple folks are so fiercely loyal to the products, there is sometimes a bit of denial that surfaces. While you very well may be right, I just don't see it. Way, way too much of a coincidence that the mail started coming from the only account left open on the phone immediately (and 2 hourss after original event) after shutting down the Yahoo account. I truly believe it's something in the phone.
Moving on.... I have a question that hopefully you can answer. I still have IOS 5.1.1 on my phone. Just to make sure that IF something is there, I was wondering if I could do the following:
1. Reset phone to factory settings (I have a recent backup)
2. Restore install newest IOS 6.3? before restoring my backup???
3. Restore from backup
OOO
This is not a simple matter of denial. There simply isn't any known malware capable of infecting an iOS device, unless it has been jailbroken. Nobody currently knows of any, not even the security companies that search carefully for such things. This is because of the way that iOS works under the hood, which makes it extremely difficult for any malware to exist on iOS.
Still, if your mind won't be settled without erasing your phone, only one thing will do. Reset it to factory settings, do not restore any backups, and upgrade to the latest version of iOS 6. Set it back up as if it were a new device.
Ok... fair enough. So, I should not restore my backup? Sure would hate to lose all of my "stuff".
If you actually believe that you are infected with something, then restoring a backup would be a very bad thing to do. If you are actually infected with some brand-new, undiscovered bit of iOS malware, then doing that could reinfect you. I don't believe that this is the case, and am confident that the problem is not malware on your iPhone, but it's your choice. You have to do whatever sets your mind at ease, but note that if you restore a backup, you might as well not waste your time resetting it in the first place.
HI Have something similar, but I am not using a public mail server. A mail has been sent from my iphone through the email account of my company, to only one person. The text of the message was simply:
"Me
Sent from my Iphone"
The other person does not seem to have received this message.
I thought it could be sent accidentally, but when the message has been sent the iphone was in my pocket, I was using a tracking program for running (endomondo) and when I switched on the phone, at the end of the workout, the firts app in use was the tracking app, not the email app.
The message has been registered on my server, I see it from my computer and from an Ipad that gets mails from my work account...
What can it be?
Your problem is not the same as that of the original poster of this thread, and it can be very confusing for everybody if we try to answer more than one question in each thread.
In order for us to give your problem our undivided attention to try to solve it, would you kindly start your own thread, describing the trouble you are having in the fullest detail, including completing your details to show what Mac or iDevice you are using, what operating system, and what version of the application in question. Please remember to post in the forum relevant to your hardware or version of OS X - or in your case the iPhone forum.
My email account is sending spam emails to my contacts
