GMail - Has someone hijacked your gmail account and is now sending emails on your behalf?

[Post published by Liviu on Liviu's [Computer Science] Blog]


Problem

What if a malicious hacker/spammer has hijacked your gmail account and is now sending emails on your behalf? Besides privacy violation, your account will also get marked as spammer and all your e-mails will get in the spam folder of your recipients.


Solution

If they have also changed your password, then you have a problem which I do not know how to solve - technically you need to contact GMail administrators. Good luck!

For the rest of the post I'll consider the case in which you still have access to your account, i.e. the password has remained the same:

1. Make sure your account has really been hijacked.
   Read thoroughly the Google Help page explaining what to do when Someone is sending from my address - also click on each of the 3 links at the end.
2. If you can confirm spam has been sent through your gmail account, then the useful link is My Contacts say I sent spam to them, or I found suspicious access to my account.
   Report it to Google.

Otherwise, just to keep yourself safe, make sure you set your browser's connection to always be https. For example, looking at my account's settings I noticed it had none of the always use https and don't always use https options set, which I suspect to be because it's a very old account; my friends' old accounts were the same.

Hope this helped you in case you were in trouble.