Why is my closed email account still sending spam?

Hackers Often Just Reopen the Account

If, somehow, you are successful at going through the steps to close your email account you'll often find that there's a out, a way - for a limited time - to re-open the account should you later change your mind. (You'd be surprised, I think, at how often people do change their minds.)

The "I didn't really mean it!" approach typically involves once again proving that you are the owner of the account with your password, the answers to your secret questions and/or confirmation sent to your alternate email address.

Or, sometimes, simply by logging into the account.

Hackers know all this.

They often know that the account can be reopened. They often know (or have themselves set) the security questions. If they can, they might even change the alternate contact information to be another account over which they have control.

So, within moments of your closing the account, the hacker re-opens it.

And continues sending spam from it.

You Often Accidentally Reopen the Account

As I mentioned above, frequently just logging into the account is enough to cancel its closure.

Many accounts these days are more than just email. On that same account you may have instant messaging programs, photo sharing services, and much, much more.

If you cancel the email account and then go log into your instant messaging program you may well have instantly re-activated the account.

IF you intend to cancel the account you have to forever walk away from everything associated with that account.

Otherwise the account may simply not be canceled.

The Hackers May Not Need Your Account

A common trick of hackers is to slip in to an account they've just hacked and steal the contents of the address book.

The damage has been done.

Even if you really, truly cancel the account and it really, truly is and stays canceled:

• Hackers can still send spam to all your contacts, which they stole.

• Hackers can even make it look like it came from you, even though they are no longer using your account - "From:" spoofing is trivially easy

So you might put a lot of time and mental energy into closing the account, and even if you're successful ... it solves nothing.

Another Way That Accounts Get Reopened

If you successfully close an account most services hold on to the account name (usually the email address) for "a while" - anywhere from a few days to a few months.

Then they make it available for new account creation, since no one is using it.

Someone could (and if your email name is particularly desirable, almost certainly will) open a new account with the email address you left behind.

And you have no idea who might get that old email address of yours.

Your old "closed" account could come back to haunt you.

But What Can I Do?

Aside from not getting your account hacked in the first place, you mean?

Not much.

And yes, it sucks that someone else might have control over your old email account and be spamming or scamming your contacts. There's still almost nothing you can do.

That's exactly why account hacks are such a bad thing.

If your account gets hacked and you can't wrest control back from the hackers, then there's only one thing you can do: create a new account, tell your contacts that the old email address isn't you any more, and get on with your life.

And take steps to ensure that your new account doesn't get hacked as well.