How do you know someone is using your email account to send Spam? Are you receiving Spam that seems to be sent by you to yourself? If so simply ignore it, never open or read this stuff as that can alert the sender that they have found a real email address.

It is indeed unfortunate when a user's e-mail address is hijacked. Fortunately it doesn't happen too often.

I agree with Owbist's thinking that you are being spammed by an e-mail generator. To be on the safe side, if this just recently started I would recommend that you do a full scan with all your security applications to insure that you haven't contracted a bug of some type. Be sure all your definitions are current.

If you do verify that it has been hijacked pretty much all you can do is create a new e-mail account and notify only those of necessity.

DA

As long as the person whom you have email contact with, has his/her computer compromised eg. with virus/Trojan which can make use of the stored email addresses and start sending out spams or virus emails.

CR is correct though that particular attack has not been around for awhile, but has appeared more than once.

The user's addressbook is penetrated and all the listed addresses are fodder for the virus to use to expand.

DA

Another way of getting your email address is when you post it openly in forum like this or fill up forms whether online or through lucky draws, customer's survey etc...