I have had several friends notify me that my email address is sending out a lot of spam. When I looked in my sent mail there were tons of mails sent to people I do not even know. How do I stop this?

Do you happen to have AOL? If you do that is your answer. Ditch AOL and you won't have any more strange email problems or connection problems either.

If this happens to be an online mail service like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc. then it's likely that your password has been stolen or hacked. Changing it to something difficult to guess should hopefully fix the problem.

If you're using a locally installed email program (such as Outlook, for example), on the other hand, and the spam shows up in your sent items box, then it sounds like you have a virus on your computer. If you have anti-virus software, you should try downloading the latest updates, rebooting in Safe mode (do you know how to do that? If not, just Google "safe mode" and you should find plenty of pages explaining how), then running a virus sweep. If you don't have anti-virus software, you should download one of the free ones, such as AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition. Then install, reboot in Safe Mode, and run the virus scan. Once the scan is finished (and hopefully finds something and cleans it), you can reboot back into normal mode and hopefully the problem will be gone.

Good luck!

Run some good viurs programs, and normally it will only send it to people on your emai list. Also go in and change your password.