It started out good. My productivity level was high and I was feeling great. Then I took a break for lunch. 20 minutes later I came back, sat down at my computer, typed in my email and discovered something horrible...
I'd been hacked.
Google, realizing that spam was being sent out from email address, disabled my email. There was no warnings, no emails to an alt. email, nothing. As panic started to set in, I clicked over to this blog.
"The blog you are looking for no longer exisists"
It was gone, banished to some nether region in the bowels of Google for reasons I didn't know.
Of course I emailed Google. What I got was a standard cookie cutter email explaining to me why some email accounts become disabled. But no reason on why mine was gone. Not to mention there was no explaination of where this blog went to. I know I didn't violate and ToS. I am careful. Especially because I maintain my business contacts in that email address.
A few hours later, I was able to get my account re-instated. Imagine my horror when I discoverd that links ( which I am assuming are virus) was sent out to everybody in my contact list. Buisness contacts, personal contacts, school district, teacher....everyone.
Fortunately, as I discovered just a few moments later, Gmail has a really good spam filter in place. And it recognized that what was being sent from my account was spam, and promptly returned all the emails. So, no harm...no foul. Though if you did get an email from me with just a link in it, please forward the header (with I.P addresses) back to me...I have a lead on who did it. I just need to verify some I.P's
So, I changed all my passwords. Set up a new email. Going to be spending the day getting everything changed over to my new email.
I am just glad that all was returned to me...intact and no permanent damage done.
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