My yahoo mail account has been stolen

The first thing to do is to try to log in to your account. If you can, then it's likely that the mail was sent with a spoofed 'From' header and not actually from your account at all. I have always received quite a few spam mails which SAY they are from me (not only on Yahoo but on Gmail and Hotmail as well) but they are always spoofs and no indication that my account has been hacked. An email has a number of fields that are filled in by the user before the mail is sent. The From: field is normally filled in automatically and the To:, Cc: and Bcc: fields are, of course, filled in by you as necessary. Spammers use software to send out bulk mails and ALL of the fields are filled in by software. The From: field is very often filled by one of the many addresses on the list and, in this case, it happens to be yours! That doesn't mean that your account has been hacked! You can check where an email really came from by looking at the full headers. That will show you the exact sequence of servers that handled the mail (you will see a sequence of 'Received from ...' messages with IP addresses, dates and times). These are added AFTER the mail was sent, so cannot be spoofed. Find the earliest of these messages and check the IP address (using one of the many websites that will give you information about IP addresses). You will usually find that it was really sent from a server in some Eastern European or East Asian country. If you are worried that your account has really been hacked, the first thing to do is to change your password.

hm, that was teriffic experience. when you last use your yahoo? public space? do you remember that you sign out when you using your yahoo?

I've had a similar experience with Yahoo, or Facebook. Someone stole all my contact email addresses and they are sending spam with my name as the sender. My grandchildren are getting emails touting Viagra. I'm sick about it, to make matters worse, I had just lost my husband and I really didn't need this added stress. I've emailed all my contacts, with an apology and explaination of what happened. I changed my password with Yahoo, but I no longer use Yahoo, so I warned everyone that if they get an email from me with a Yahoo address they should not open it. I contacted Yahoo support and they had no solutions for me, that ticked me off. Yahoo will do nothing to find the spammers and would not help me. I also dropped Facebook as it is possible that the hacker got my addresses from there. When I first signed up with Facebook, Facebook copied everything from my Yahoo address book. So there was another source for hacker/spammers. If Yahoo or Facebook can't do better at protecting my information, I won't be a member. The ony advice I can give you is that you sign up with another email provider and drop Yahoo.

3 years back my business yahoo mail account has been stolen. Still now i try to login the account but no use. I had many contacts in that yahoo mail account. We should set secondary mail ids to handle these hackers. Cheers