I was "online" long before most people had heard of the Internet and have never heard of using aliases as a security precaution. Years ago I participated in online forums where pseudonyms were prohibited, with the though being that by using their real name participants would be more civil. This seems to be an example of the fine line between prudence and paranoia. We just saw a major security breach where a company's records were compromised. Certainly the only information released wasn't a list of email addresses. So now somebody has a list of email addresses, names, company affiliations, and the like. What good does having a fictitious email address do those people?

Susan, I was taken in by the same thing. Did you get an error message saying the page couldn't be loaded? I did. I posted here for help and got nothing useful. I called my ISP and explained what happened. They suggested that since the page didn't load, I was probably okay. That wasn't reassuring enough so I did more research. I'm STILL not sure the trojan wasn't loaded on my computer. There's a free program you can download called HijackThis that lists everything running on your computer. You can print a log file and have someone knowledgeable look at it to see if something is hiding. I did the first part and now need to find that knowledgeable person. There are supposed to be expert forums online where you can submit your file log and they'll tell you if there's anything suspicious. Not sure if I feel secure using that at this point. BTW, HijackThis is rated very highly by the editors of Cnet. Good luck! Here is a link that might be useful: HijackThis download/review

I don't know anyone who supplies there real info to web based email accounts. Why would anyone do that?? What ever info you enter should be written down and saved somewhere though. If you should ever forget your password or your account gets hijacked they will ask you for you "information". After all they can't just send out passwords for accounts to just anybody who asks for it claiming to be the owner of said account. I learned this the hard way with my Yahoo account. They needed to know my birthday in order to retrieve my password for me and how the heck would I remember what I had put down when I signed up? Good-bye Yahoo email account. Some email services ask for your referrer email account too so take note of that also.

More likely this is a trojan or something rather than a virus. Not typical virus activity. I assume you're using Microsoft programs for email? You might want to reconsider them if you do since they're such easy pickings for malware. Do you have a GOOD firewall? Do you have an antivirus program UPDATED REGULARLY? Do you run Windows Updates regularly? Do you have SpywareBlaster installed and UPDATED REGULARLY? Do you have 2 or 3 programs like Advanced SystemCare, Spybot, SuperAntiSpyare, Malwarebytes, etc, run regularly and UPDATED regularly? Are you on a wireless network? If so, do you secure it? Do you let others use your computer? Do you use an online method of saving your contacts? Those are places to start.