E-mail question--what would you do?

If she was using an account like Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo it might not help much. More than likely it is an account she abandoned. Spammer look for accounts like this because the original owner likely won't ever notice it is being used. I would report it to whoever the .com is. Calling her parents couldn't hurt but if she is locked out of the account it could take awhile if at all to get the account back.

We get emails from a dead relative whose account is closed.

There is nothing anyone's parents or relatives can do so no reason to contact them.

I've received e-mails like this. I doubt if the girl had anything to do with it. If I get an e-mail from a friend, and the subject line looks suspicious, I don't open it. A friend of mine's regular account was hacked, and I was bombarded with messages from her. I didn't open any of them, as the subject lines were suspicious. When I talked to her, she told me she had no idea and don't open anything from her for a while. She said other friends were getting these e-mails too.

I agree - it wouldn't hurt to call the girl's parents to let them know what's going on. They may be unaware of the whole thing!

Many spam messages have "spoofed" addresses, so even though it appears to come from a specific account... that's not necessarily the case. A spammer can get random addresses and plug them in to make it appear the sender is someone you know. Also, as others have said, the account might even have been abandoned or closed.

It might not hurt to call, if you want, to see if the account's being used and if these messages are actually residing in the girl's "Sent" folder/mailbox. If they are, they came from her account. If they aren't, the "From:" address is spoofed.

Most spam can only be stopped with filters on your own account. You can get pretty creative with the filters by blocking certain words or phrases.

hth!

The parents may not want to try to remove your name....could set off new viruses or spam. Just keep sending any you receive to junk. Deleting them won't help reduce them. You need to send to Junk and then Block them.

block the email account and mark as spam.

There's a chance that it could also be malware. That is just a thought.

We had this happen to us a few years ago.

We ended up getting a Facebook Trojan through a friend of ours.

All that I did was open a legitimate looking e-mail of hers that was infected with this Trojan.

As a result, we kept getting these strange e-mails with strange headings in them, coming from her e-mail address.

Her computer was infected, too. She ended up calling me and apologizing. She had let her antivirus coverage lapse on her computer, and she was in the process of cleaning up her own computer.

Some of the subject titles were addressed to my husband in his name, but they would be like, "Hey, what's up dude?" Our friend would never send a subject heading like that to my husband, as she just wouldn't talk like that to him.

These viruses/malware take over the person's address book, and then they send out these strange e-mails to everyone listed in the infected person's address book. That is what happens.

On my end, I didn't know that my antivirus program at the time, was not working right and was not able to keep up with antivirus/antimalware updates.

The e-mails kept coming back into our e-mail inbox because the Trojan was sitting in the computer's hard drive, and I had to get it out of there.

The antispyware program Malwarebytes found it, and I was able to delete it that way, and that took care of it from our e-mail program, too.