Wednesday 3 November 2010

Email not working?!

I love my new HTC phone, but one thing I did not count on was having my email account used to send spam to my whole address book. The first time my partner told me he just got a spam email from me with over 20 other recipients I thought it was weird, and didn't really look into it.

I love technology, but checking 50-100 emails a week is not the most exciting part of it. So being able to do it from my phone, was much more appealing. About a week after the first spam email, after another 3 or more, I realized that these emails were sent on the days that I was checking my email on my phone.

I was using the HTC email app so it had to be some other innocent looking download that was hijacking me email. Unfortunately, a lot of free games come with adverts which require internet access, so I couldn't figure out the culprit by looking for the ones with unnecessary permissions.

So I went through a deep clean process:
1. Closed any running apps (I used Advanced Task Killer Free)
2. Settings-> Applications-> Manage Applications
Here I checked each app and deleted the cache
3. Uninstall any apps I don't really recognize or use
4. connect my phone to my computer and have my anti virus scan it straight away.
5. a virus and malware scan on the computer, just in case.

Anti virus software used: Kaspersky
Malware software used: CCleaner (cleans registry), Spybot - Search & Destroy, Malwarebyte's AntiMalware,MalAware , SUPERAntiSpyware

The difficulty was in getting my email address to work again, as AOL had blocked it after all the spam activity. I could use the email online but not through a program. I kept getting a 554 error from the AOL servers.

After playing about with the email settings, what seemed to do it was changing the smtp & imap, doing a through clear of the cache & saved settings with CCleaner and logging onto my email through a browser. Next day, to my great surprise: a working email! And now I feel quite triumphant :)