The following are just my opinions...take 'em or leave 'em.
What you have described is pretty much why I believe that the popular webmail services (Hotmail-Gmail-Yahoo-AOL and others) are pretty much useless as a primary email address. They are really good only for collecting spam or registering with web sites or other service providers with whom you don't need to communicate regularly.

There really is nothing better than creating a primary email address through your Internet provider (or as many email addresses as you require) and using the email client of your choice (Windows Live Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird or something else) to send and receive your email. It may require a little bit of effort, but it is time well spent.

My Thunderbird has never been hacked, nor do I have to look at unsolicited advertising. YMMV.

Changing the password on your yahoo account may or may not stop it but unless you close the account you should change the password anyway. I agree with azinoh about isp email addresses but if you change providers it's a headache to change email addresses. That's why I went to google for my prime email address.

casi-
You may or may not have been hacked. Sometimes hackers use a legitimate email address and send out emails that appear to come from that address, but aren't. In any case, if you want to keep this account, change the password immediately...that may resolve the problem.

In addition, I would suggest you send an email to a selection of people in your address list and say that you may have been hacked and would appreciate it if they would reply back to you if they have gotten spam that appears to come from your address, or get something in the next few days. This may help you judge if it's just a one-time thing.

I respect azinoh's opinions, but I am less critical about webmail services. I've had a Hotmail address that I use daily and it's never been hacked in over 20 years. I have also had several Yahoo accounts for about 10 years, and they haven't been hacked either. I prefer not to have an email address that is connected to my Internet provider of the moment.

Those of us who use cellular wi-fi as our ISP do not have an e-mail address provided by same, so we are forced to use a web based e-mail service. Also, there are some ISPs who are using Gmail as their mail service.

casi,

Be sure that, when you change your password, you also check ALL your other security settings in the account in case the hacker (if there was one) changed them to something he/she wanted.

Check:

- alternate/back-up email addresses,
- aliases,
- security question answers (for password reset; be sure the answers are the ones you put in there; better yet, change them to be on the safe side !),
- mobile phone numbers,

and any other personal information you've got there !

For years there has been a reoccurring infection occurring through e-mail addressbooks. The two most common ways of contracting the bug is to open an unsolicited e-mail, either by error or negligence, and by the infection being passed to you by a user who has your address stored in their addressbook.

In the latter case the alpha user contracts the virus and it is spread to all the entries in his/her addressbook. These users then become secondary hosts and infect all the addresses in their addressbook. Those users pass the bug along to all the addresses in their addressbook theus creating tertiary hosts. And so forth.

From a single infection the virus extrapolates in a shotgun manner to many, many systems.

Knock on wood, seven Hotmail accounts and a Yahoo account with a history of never a concern.

DA

Make good passwords!

I have to deal with peoples password problems too much.
I can't login, what do I do.

Oh.... this guy has learned to hate seeing those words.

PayPal account was the best a couple years back...
Girl, Everyday locked out for 'supsious activity'
Everyday she had eamil from PayPal..
everyday was forced to change the password.

Over & over for a week probably this went on.

When she finally began to realize I was tired of hearing the problems this caused her,
she trusted me to make her a new password...
her current password was 12345678

She's was lucky she had money still in her bank.

Unfortunately people tend to use real words or dates as passwords, it takes mere seconds for a brute force program to crack those. Unless you are using a long nonsense combo of letters and numbers at the very least then you are apt to fall prey . Hotmail has now started alerting users if they find they are using easy to crack passwords. You must change it or they will.

But it may not be you at all, many infections just pick a random address from the infected persons address book, spoofing, so some one with your address in their address book could be the one infected. See it all the time.

I once again refer the review of the subject to January 2012 issue of Consumer Reports, "Hack-Proof Your Passwords".

A small part paraphrased, "Making a password longer also helps......using a hash-breaking spreadsheet.....we estimate that it would typically take a $2,000 computer 2 1/2 hours to crack the strongest seven-character password......An eight character password.....about 10 days.....a nine-character password approximately two and a half years."

DA

I disagree that "free" email accounts are somehow "inferior" to paid accounts through an ISP. I have three primary email accounts. One through Comcast (although I haven't been a Comcast customer in years), Hotmail, and most recently Gmail. Both the Comcast and Hotmail accounts I've had for more than a decade. The Comcast account was my "primary" account shared with family, friends, business associates, a select online vendors. Hotmail serves as a "catch all" for everything else. With the addition of an Android phone, I have migrated to Gmail as my primary account for the last year or so.

In terms of pure spam, I get more in my Comcast in-box than with either of the other two accounts. Not that there is a lot, maybe 2-4 pieces of spam per week. Hotmail averages about 1 piece per month and I haven't seen any in my Gmail account.

Regardless of where you get your email account, it's important to use a hard password, even if you use an email reader like Outlook or Thunderbird. If you can't make your own hard password, there are online services that will generate one for you. Write it down on a piece of paper.

Google has actually has stepped up the game by allowing you to limit access to your Gmail account to selected computers and devices. Once you set it up, a password alone IS NOT sufficient to access your account from an unauthorized computer or device. For most purposes your Gmail account becomes hack proof.

Google knows everything about you.. Loss of All Privacy the instant you give them any info. I think of them as a hacker.

just my opinion

Mikie,

I tend to agree with you. I have never read Google's EULA, but it's growth, data gathering, and data retention can be a little unsettling when you sit and think about it. Plus, it's everywhere in one form or another and the user has no control. I predict, with no evidence just a hunch, that someday we will see a federal investigation into them and some resulting litigation; white collar civil and perhaps criminal.

DA

I have had the same hotmail account since the day I got on the internet, so a LONG time, and never once had a problem with spam, hacking, or anything else. There were the occasional growing glitches as they changed the system over the years but I have been very happy with it. I personally never use the email that is provided by my ISP. The only time we did was way back in the days of MSN dial up! and even then I had my hotmail.

So I do not think there is anything better about ISP over free either. I much prefer all of my freebies. I think since I have been on comcast I may have checked that email address I got there once in 2 yrs. And lo and behold it was full of spam LOL and never used.

Passwords are key!!I tell my family that all the time and still they use their dogs name as their password, my neice's daughter helped her friends set up facebook and twitter accounts and she used the same password for ALL of them. She just could not understand why I nearly had a stroke on that one. I just give up.

What does it take to create a password? To protect your savings and your identity?

I personally keep a note book that has all my sites and their associated user name and password. I write it in there every time I get a new one or change one. I keep that notebook in a very secure locked location. Now if at some point a burglar manages to break into my house, kill me and my husband, steal my computers and also manage to find and steal my password notebook well at that point he can have it. Because I am pretty sure he will be bleeding pretty badly himself, and I won't need it. LOL

What would be your views on the length of passwords ? I've skimmed a few pages on passwords & password creation last week, as a matter of fact. And, not surprisingly, one gets different viewpoints.

Some say password length doesn't matter so much as complexity. Others say that a long alpha-numeric password is as good as a short one with special characters.

Some say it should have at least 14 characters. Others say 16. Others say that, in these days with very powerful computers, brute force attacks can only be more securely prevented by using passwords over 24 characters.

(Hotmail, which is my main account at the moment, only allows 16 characters maximum ! I'd much prefer they expand that, so I could have a 30+ character password. I also wish Hotmail would get the 2-step verification that Gmail uses (preferring the ounce of prevention to the pound of cure), but that's another story.)

Anyway, what are the opinions of the experienced contributors here on the issue of password length ?

Thanks for any comments ! :-)

Yes, the longer and more complex the better, but I typically use a mix of numbers, letters, upper/lower case that is shorter than 14 characters. Just because a supercomputer can crack a complex password in a relatively short time doesn't bother me. What is the likelihood that someone is going to use even an hour or two of supercomputer time to hack into my pathetic email account? The most important things I do to stay safe are:
1.) Use a different password at every site that involves a financial transaction.
2.) Use a virtual keyboard, like Neo's Safekeys, to log in to my accounts, which essentially prevents a keylogger from harvesting my passwords.

Here is a link that might be useful: Neo's Safekeys

I do have to believe we are talking about two different classes of passwords; general accounts and critical. Our emphasis here is on the critical passwords such as financial or personal accounts.

DA

damccoy-
I agree that the critical passwords are more important. Do you consider an email account to fall into the general or critical category?

I personally consider it critical because of the info that comes into it. Purchase info, bank updates, and site registrations.

fabrication-
That's where I'm coming out on it too.

Well, a little levity...my Android Swype keyboard must have decide that "ravencajun" was not in the dictionary and corrected it to "fabrication"!

Previously used shopping sites, financial sites, medical sites and e-mail accounts associated with them are critical as they have personal information.

Visited-only shopping sites and all other sites are general.

Of all the eight e-mail accounts I have only two are legitimate. All the rest are established fictitiously. Why would I care if someone liberated my password here or any other general site?

Also, never, never store your credit card on a shopping site when using.

DA

Thanks for the comments on my question !

(My apologies if I took the thread off-track !)