I got DUPED by a spam email

This is a little off topic topic but if you've never been foolish enough to fall prey to a spam email let me tell you it ain't no fun. It all started with something that seemed innocent enough to me but that rapidly began a descent into email hell.

I got an innocent looking email that said an acquaintance of mine wanted me to see some pictures she had posted on something called TAGGED. Well it look sort of like one of those things you get when someone sends you an album of pictures and you have to click on a link to open the albums. It was late on Sunday night I was taking one last look at my email before I went to bed after a great but exhausting weekend of playing host to my two granddaughters ages 5 and 3. I was beat and not thinking clearly. Plus the thumbnail pictures being shown were of horses and this acquaintance of mine is a horse owner. So I bit on it.

Now the obvious signs of this being a scam were there, why I didn't see any of them I don't know, but I took the next stupid step. First there was a comment that said my acquaintance would be upset with me if I didn't sign up to see the pictures. Then, and this is the one I really cant forgive myself for, it asked for my email password and I entered it. I know, I know, I know, I am a dumbkoff, but enter it I did. I knew right away that I had screwed up because there were no pictures.

So now I went into panic mode. I updated my virus scan and did a full system scan. This took about 30 minutes, long after I had wanted to be in bed. The good news was that this thing does not install a virus on your system, in fact it doesn't hurt your system at all. So I did think to change the password on my email system and thought that would be that. So I fell asleep waiting for me virus scan to be completed. About 12:30 I woke up again and went to check my computer to see how the scan turned out and to turn my computer off. I was glad to see the scan showed no virus', but there was the first email, "Bill did you send me this email about pictures on TAGGED." RATS the dang thing was spamming my email contacts list. What do I do now?

Now I went into panic mode number 2 which consisted of tossing and turning while trying to sleep and not think about what I had done. Finally at 5 AM I couldn't stand it anymore and got up and blearily went to my computer to figure how I could solve this problem.

It took me about an hour to figure out how to get to my email accounts list of "contacts" and how to send a large number of those people a notice that. "I DID NOT SEND YOU THE EMAIL ABOUT THE PICTURES, SO DON'T OPEN IT." I sent that to the some of the 738 contacts I had in my email system.

Then I got the email from an East Coast friend that said they looked this thing up on snopes and that it was just an annoying way to get people to sign up to this social networking system, but that it did no harm to anyone beyond that, here is the link to snopes http://www.snopes.com/computer/internet/tagged.asp.

Well I was somewhat relieved to know I wasn't part of a plot to install virus' on peoples computers, and now made the mistake of overcompensating. I wanted people to know I was not a bad guy, and I wanted to make sure they didn't put me on their spam list. So I decided to send out a second email. This one would go EVERYONE on my contacts list, (I had learned a lot about my contacts list, and was feeling confident at this point). So I composed a new message.

I wanted to assure people that there was nothing dangerous about the original spam message they might have gotten from me. So I entitled this one, "If you got an email message from Bill Gaughan about pictures, it is not harmful". Well it never occurred to me that if I were going to send out a harmful message THIS IS EXACTLY HOW I WOULD TITLE IT. Plus as I was sending these out in batches of 99 I got a message from my email provider, that I had exceeded the maximum number of messages I could send in a day, and MY ABILITY TO SEND EMAIL WOULD BE CUT OFF FOR 24 HOURS.

So now I started getting more emails, "Bill did you send this?", but of course I can't respond for 24 hours. I imagine I will be reported as a spammer and all the people I need to correspond with will no longer get any email at all from me.

So far this is eaten up about 6 total hours of my time. I'm operating on little to no sleep, but I suppose the good news is my total email traffic will now drop off to almost nothing because everyone THINKS I'M A SPAMMER!!!!.

I love technology.