Paperless Post scam was sending from my account
My husband opened a paperless post scam email in our shared email account a few weeks ago. He didn't fall for the prompts asking for login info, and we thought everything was fine but just today it sent out a whole batch of phishing emails to other people from our account. Just thought I'd share some details here:
I cannot see all the sent emails. I found one in my sent file, and one in my trash file, but based on responses I'm getting back and slightly varied text, I know that e-mails went out that I am not able to find.
I wanted to warn our contacts. I wasted a bunch of time trying to send emails directly from our account, but then realized that I actually needed to send to every address we have had contact with (some 2500), and that emails with even 50 recipients were getting caught in others' spam filters. So, I ended up going to an email marketing platform - I used Campaign Monitor. I should have done that in the first place - would have saved myself some time and gotten to a few more people before they opened the scam email. It was quick and easy, though I did have to bump up to a paid monthly account for $47 to send that many. (Penance.) Once I had the addresses in there a quick search for "unsubscribe" and "contact" in the addresses helped weed out addresses that were not actual people and got me below a price threshold.
And, if this happens to you, definitely your first step should be to send out a text or email to elderly relatives who are guaranteed to open this nice invite they got from you and enter all their personal data into it. I got to my uncle too late. :(