Hotmail, Yahoo or AOL accounts are particular red flags to scammers. This is exacerbated if they know you to be elderly.
Without getting into specifics, compromised accounts, hacking and “SMTP spoofing” are three different things; the latter varies in danger in correlation to the IT savviness of the average person in your contacts database.
Some Notes:
- have a “real” email account with your own domain (sub £10 and will take you 10minutes to set up
- have separate email addresses for personal/business/public use (personal is friends/family; public is buying a pair of socks off the internet)
- avoid the “Mom & Pop” security software variants such as Norton or McAfee
- use a VPN when on public Wi-Fi
- never log into your internet banking over public Wi-Fi
- don’t put your whole address book on any web-based email system (Gmail included)
- back up all your stuff - ALWAYS
Though Dennis’ problem seems a short-term inconvenience, over the past years I have seen two instances where an individual’s business was ruined by such problems (which could have easily been guarded against). One instance was a gentleman about 65-70 years old who had retired from a senior role with a large international firm and had a consultancy in his given sector. He had the usual AOL email problem and was effectively shut down for four weeks – from which he never recovered.