Protect Gmail Accounts: Some Gmail users have reported that there are some spam emails in their sent mail folders. But before you change your password, read this article.
How to Protect Gmail Accounts from Weird Spam Emails
There is something strange about our Gmail accounts, some people have indeed noticed spam messages present in the Gmail folders of sent mail. This can only mean one thing, right? These accounts have been compromised, which means a password change is required .
The problem is that spam seems to persist even after changing the password (as reported in theGmail help forums).
To make matters worse, it appears that even enabling two-factor authentication (aka 2FA) does not solve the problem. In fact, even users who have activated the two-factor authentication system continue to report spam emails sent from their accounts to other email accounts.
So what’s happening and what can we do about it?
According to a statement Google provided to Mashable , the company is “aware of a spam campaign that impacts a small subset of Gmail users and has actively taken steps to protect itself from this.”
Protect Gmail Accounts: Check your sent mail folder
To see if your account has “sent” spam, go to the sent mail folder and look for suspicious messages, anything that was not sent by you or that appears to be blatantly advertising. (One user reported emails related to weight loss advertisements.)
Did you find some spam messages with you as the sender? You can report such messages as spam with just a few clicks by automatically moving them to the correct folder.
But here’s the thing: Google claims that even if you find spam messages coming from your address, you can still be safe. In fact, forging your email address is so easy for spammers, your account may never actually have been compromised.
Therefore, the presence of these messages in your sent mail folder could be more of a database management problem by Gmail, where the system incorrectly routes the mail to the sent folder, rather than to the “spam” folder.
Google claims that its engineers “have identified and are reclassifying all spam emails, having no reason to believe that some accounts have been hacked.”
Protect Gmail Accounts: What Can We Do To Be Safe?
Enable two-factor authentication:
If you haven’t already done so, this system prevents anyone from accessing your Google / Gmail account, unless they are able to provide a secondary password , generated in real time and sent to the your phone number.
Make sure no app has permissions to access your Gmail account:
This issue is similar to the one that happened recently with the Facebook account, prior to the Cambridge Analytica case.
Check your browser extensions
If you find weird extensions that you don’t recognize, we can conveniently uninstall them.