apologies

I have to apologize to friends, family and employment agencies for an unfortunate incident.

According to my Yahoo! account's "sent mail" folder, my email sent - between 6:15 AM and 6:20 AM this morning - a message with "[No Subject]" in the subject field and a spam URL in the message body. To every address in my contact list. Including me. Ouch!

My computer was logged off (and turned off) at the time that message was sent, but I hadn't logged out of Yahoo! yesterday. In fact, I usually don't log out of Yahoo! at all; the session is supposed to time out automatically. I have had it time out on me recently after walking away from the computer and becoming engrossed in other activities.

The first clue that something was amiss appeared as soon as I booted up and loaded my email. There were several bounced messages saying "[No Subject]", which is odd because I almost never forget to write something in the subject line. Also, the bounces were from old and invalid addresses that I never deleted from my contact list.

I ran a couple of different (very good and properly updated) antivirus programs but found nothing.

I guess I'll be logging out of Yahoo! after every session; better change my password too. And I'll weed out the contact list.