About ten days ago my email inbox suddenly filled up with hundreds of bounce-backs, or rejected emails.

Now I can handle rejection as I’ve had a lot of experience with it, but it’s harder to take when I didn’t send the emails in the first place.

Some persons, and I can’t include my usual jingoistic, racist or offensive slurs here because I haven’t a clue who they might be, spoofed my email address to make it look as if it was me offering Online Medical Isurance. Clearly English wasn’t their first language, neither did they trouble with the services of a spell-checker. The emails were sent from “‘ivana leoni’ <gwyn.headley@fotoLibra.com>”

When the name of the sender bears no relationship whatsoever to the email address, my suspicions are roused. And I’m seldom wrong. It’s a cheap scam, and I can’t see many people falling for it. I know they’ll get me in the end, because as I get older and stupider, they will be getting younger and smarter, and soon they will suss that organisations like HMRC take care to spell their emails correctly.

All this is par for the course in our new, exciting digital world, and I would have passed this off as hardly worthy of comment, were it not for one debilitating outcome: since the spoof I have been unable to send any emails. My Mail client refuses to recognise my (valid) password. It’s been ten days now, and frankly I’m fed up. I have tried everything I can think of, and nothing works.

I’ve placed it in the hands of my email provider — I can do no more — and hope that they will be able to magic up a solution. The only alternative is to delete all my email accounts, in the process losing access to my email archive, and open completely new accounts.

Too drastic a step. But some petty criminal will have driven me to do it, benefitting them not a jot.

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