That doesn't necessarily mean Annie has been hacked, only that someone has harvested somebody's address book with her address in it. Spam like that never comes from the address that is shown. Usually it has nothing to do with the computer of the person whose address you see.

But it was sent to me as if from Annie. They had my address. They have the address of everyone in Annie's email.

They can strip those off of e-mails intercepted en route. Or the e-mail address book online might have been hacked. It doesn't necessarily mean full intrusion.

Good of you to post a notice and reminder.

Did the sender's email match Annie's?

That's the first thing I check when I receive suspicious mail. It never matches my contact's email either.

I used to get emails from, what appeared to be, friends and members of this forum, many years ago.

Oftentimes, the subject line appeared sketchy to me. (Either the message itself, or the spelling seemed a little off. It's common knowledge I have trust issues) , so I never clicked to open any of them.

If you'd like to avoid this, next time you get an email that may not appear legit, try this:

Hover your mouse over the link. It will show the URL that link will send you to, if you click on it.

You will notice that the domain does not match the source of the email.

Hovering your mouse over a link, will reveal its true destination.

Sol

Yes. I should have been much more cautious. Once I am suspicious of an email, I check things out, and above all never click on a link in email. But in this case, first thing in the morning, things that should have alerted me did not. For example, there was no subject line. But I often send emails without one. I was actually thinking maybe Annie had some news, possibly bad, about someone. Not anyone in particular, but maybe to do with the flood (I'd been wishing we'd heard from May (Lowspark).

Hey, anyone can get tripped up, considering how much "virtual" junk we get bombarded with on a daily basis. And the tricks keep evolving too!

Karen (Riverrat) just heard from May! She is okay! See Peppi's thread.

Great. Thanks CC, for the heads up. I got hacked a couple of months ago, Yahoo wanted me to change my password. I did and promptly got locked out of email altogether for over a week. Ugh.

I'll change it again.....

Annie

Or just four random common words. See https://xkcd.com/936/

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).

OK, mine was 14 characters long, with 2 numbers, one uppercase letter and one "special" character. Wasn't good enough, apparently.....

Annie

That means your password wasn't hacked. No one would bother doing that with a strong password just for email spoofing. Either the admin of your ISP was hacked, someone who legitimately has the contact info was, or the offenders stipped the headers off transiting emails.