can you hijack another persons e-mail address ?

Question

i sent a e-mail to a lifelong friend today, they answered my mail and we talked on the phone later. aprox 2 hours ago i recieved another e-mail from my friend cussing me out and saying horrible things, i called my friend and he said he had nothing to do with the latter e-mail. i tend to beleive him because he is a deeply spiritual person and i have never heard him use ONE foul word in his life. his wife is out of town and his kids are grown, so there was nobody else at home when the e-mail was sent. could someone else be responsible for this ?....10 points for a real answer, because iam worried about my e-mail security now. thanks

Answer 1

Well, yes and no... If you have a Trojan Virus someone can in fact log into an email account and send whatever. Get a good Virus scanner and Firewall protection. And by all means change your email account password after you do so.

Answer 2

There's a few things that can happen: 1) There's a virus on someone's (or your) computer, it chooses your name as the sender and sends it to everyone else in the address book (including your friend) 2) Someone has your account information, either by you leaving a session/email client open for someone to use (e.g. at work) or someone has stolen your account information. There's many ways to steal account information without you knowing about it. 3) Someone is maliciously using your email address to send a message to this person. If some person knows of a public SMTP server (a server that sends mail without authentication), anyone can log-in, send a message with the sender as anyone they want. I can log into my school's server and send anybody any message from [e-mail] or [e-mail]. First thing you should do is make sure your friend knows it wasn't you that sent the message. Secondly, change your password. Third, check to see if your email provider uses SSL for email send/receive. Lastly, secure your internet connection, if you're using wireless, use WEP keys and MAC address filtering.

Answer 3

He should try changing his password to something no-one else can think of. If someone got a hold of ur email and password they can easily send messages though ur email. Or if u want to go an extreme you might want to delete ur email and create a new one. But that would be going to the extreme, changing ur password should help but creating a new email and deleting ur existing email will definitely solve the problem

Answer 4

only if they know your password for your email account. it will be quiet easy to set up and handle some else's email address if you know there user name and password and email account settings for there ISp.

Answer 5

If it was hotmail, I'm not surprised because there is a hotmail hacking tool floating around.

Answer 6

somebody else knew her/his password