Well, this is fun. I woke up this morning to discover that someone had used my email address to send about 25 messages at 6:25 AM to addresses composed of random strings of letters (“yfecbuv AT yfecbuv DOT net), and to addresses like xbox AT hotmail DOT com. So Bluehost put me on Administrative Prohibition, which means I can’t even send messages until this gets cleared up.
FRAK.
Oh, and remember how I thought my husband lost my PayPal card? Um, yeah. He didn’t. I got a Kajeet cell phone in the mail for a product review (the review will be up at MomReviews in a little while), and I needed a debit card number so they can charge the monthly fee. Apparently I used my PayPal card, and then put the card into the box that the phone came in, and put it on the bookshelf. Yesterday I got the box out to look at the instruction book, and there was my card. Which I already reported lost/stolen. And PayPal is taking forever to send me a new one.
Today? At the grocery store? I went to pay and discovered that my OTHER debit card? The one for my credit union account? Not in my wallet. Used it to buy gas the other day, and now?
Somebody please smack some sense into me, okay? I am clearly losing it in a big way. I’m about ready to do a major clean sweep of my entire life here. My computer is hacked, my debit cards are lost, my product review stuff is piled up all over the place, OH, and the t-shirts for the Memory Walk? I went to the Personalize This counter only to discover that the graphic is the wrong size. So I had to come home and then I’ll have to go out again, in the rain.
Could I just get a do-over? That’d be great.
Twitter: pz5wjj
says:
Poor thing! And it’s raining… Do overs are totally in line!
Administrative Prohibition sounds like a severe punishment.
Keep your chin up! Things can only get better!
blarg sounds so not fun it’s not even… um.. funny?
Good to hear your card wasn’t stole, even IF you have to wait for a new one. The couple of times I’ve been burgled (once my car, another time my purse was stolen from a changing room as I was switching from one size sweater to another) I felt so violated. Not in a bad-touching kind of way but in a VERY taken advantage of way.
and yeah, I have to agree with Jean-Luc, Administrative Prohibition sounds very severe to me. If it makes you feel any better my virus scanner found a virus on my machine a couple of days ago and the only places I’ve been online were to PLAN MY WEDDING! (oh and here of course but I know you obviously weren’t the one or I wouldn’t be posting this! hehe) Talk about being taken advantage of!
Go easy on yourself, sissy. Everyone has moments of absent mindedness. A misplaced Pay-Pal card and/or credit card is by no means a reason for someone to smack you, and if they do they’ll have ME to contend with!
Holee crap. I’d crawl back into bed for a day after that. I have so done almost all of that and most of it deals with when I want to pay with something for a check to get verification its paid for and then realize I have none on me because I don’t carry them.
Sounds Bad
But I guess you will come out of it, i always thought of you as the fighting types. “Never Say Die”
Have you got any idea what they were sending? Is it the email address on your about page, which is consequently available to every man and his dog and or cat on the internet?
Spammers often “steal” an email address but it doesn’t mean the email was actually sent from your computer. Did you get bounces back to your computer? If so, can you forward one of them to the email address I’ve posted this with, and I’ll take a look. I suspect that is what has happened.
There is no reason for a host to put you on any kind of probation if that is what has happened because they are well aware this happens.
My advice to you would be to separate your email from your blog host, otherwise they could take your blog offline for reasons completely unrelated to your blog.
I also suggest not to use an email with your domain for your contact me address on the internet. I used to recommend gmail as a free email address but I don’t anymore – unless you are willing to check it manually daily and check the spam bin to make sure nothing got trapped in there – due to their spam catcher being too strict. Fastmail.fm have a great service but you are limited to 10mb unless you choose one of their paid email programs.
At this stage yahoo is probably your best bet but you do not want it to be a .com yahoo – you get free email forwarding and a couple of other extra features on a yahoo that has a country code on the end, like .com.au
I’ll try and work up a post about email for early next week, if I can.
Cheers,
Snoskred
http://www.snoskred.org
Twitter: Table4Five
says:
Mimi-You must have talked to your Mom today! Yes, it’s been raining on and off, and it’s really cold, like almost-time-to-turn-the-furnace on cold! Keep your fingers crossed that we have good weather for the Memory Walk on Sunday!
Twitter: Table4Five
says:
Graham- I know! I was completely locked out of my domain email accounts until I called BlueHost, then they reset it but I still had to wait an hour. It must be automatic when they detect that much activity all at once. But still!
Twitter: Table4Five
says:
Jenn-Thanks for the positive thoughts!
Twitter: Table4Five
says:
Sissy-I’ve been complaining to Chris about my machine running really slowly, so he ran a spybot program-168 problems in my files. All kinds of crap that I’m sure I didn’t install. But no information at all about what kinds of emails were sent, who they were sent to-the guy at Bluehost acted like I shouldn’t be asking questions about my own account! Pissed me off.
Twitter: Table4Five
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Blueyes-I never carry checks either, but every once in a while I go into a business that doesn’t take debit cards either! Everything should just be FREE, dammit. LOL
Twitter: Table4Five
says:
Kiviniar-Thank you
Despite my general pessimism, my glass-half-EMPTY look on life, I do just soldier on through the bad times, because life CAN be good!
Twitter: Table4Five
says:
Snoskred-What I had this morning was in inbox full of “MAILER-DAEMON” delivery failure messages. So I think whomever hacked my email tried to use it to bounce spam through, but BlueHost caught it first. Which is why it is so weird that they suspended my email.
I took my email address off the front page, and I changed the one on my About page to my gmail address. I know gmail isn’t 100 % against spam, but I just can’t keep track of any more email addresses right now! So do you think I should not use a domain email account at all? I already had to delete table4five AT table4five DOT net because it was getting horrible spam attacks. I just want to get my email in peace! LOL
Twitter: reply
says:
Thanks for the positive thoughts!