Thank you, Aurora, great explanations. Lucky, very funny! Silvana, no, you did not get hacked and don't have to do anything. I got hacked because I did not follow my own advice. I got an email from an unfamiliar address on a topic I did not recognize with a link that was also unfamiliar. So, there were three clues. But I clicked away. That is all it takes, one click, for a hacker to be able to clone something that resembles a person's name and address. To get rid of a spam email, just send it to the spam folder on your email account, then empty the spam folder. You can change your password if you want. I put a more complete explanation on a new thread. However, Aurora explained it better than I could! It would be good if the Moderators would read this and remove the two posts with the bogus links on them. I will try to contact the Moderators to have those two posts by the hacker removed from the threads, however, I don't think that was what caused the hacking of my email. Joanne This post was edited by fortyseven on Wed, Nov 26, 14 at 0:45

This email looked like any other I would get from a friend. That's the problem, nothing suspicious at all about it and I'm always pretty alert having been trained by the very best in the business. It was not spam, it was much worse than that. The purpose was "phishing" to collect personal information and target us for fraud.

SPAM

I have some long passwords. Throw in capitals and you get another 26 options, then there are special characters. Most nowadays require at least one captital, one lower case and one special, and at least eight overal, and remembering these gets really tricky, but writing them down, and especially putting them in your browser's autofil, is the least secure of all! The long ones really work pretty well and are easier to remember. If you have to have a special and captital, it's not as secure as random, but you can set single rules, such as the seventh letter will be the only capital, and the fifth character will be an asterisk. If it's not someone who has watched you, or heard your keyboard, i.e., if it's just a 'bot, that's just about as secure as if they were random. The most secure password is long and totally random, but good luck remembering if you don't use it several times daily. And even then, you have to hope the hacker can't reverse engineer the encoding in the recognition system (that's nigh on impossible, but people do the impossible daily).