Quote - If you are using the web version of Yahoo mail, get to another clean computer and change your password. The e-mailings will then stop.

It solves nothing because is not Yahoo that is sending the emails. It is a virus SMTP server that is using your email address as "reply to" or "from" address

Quote - One thing I don't understand, if it has nothing to do with my computer, how come they seem to have access to my yahoo contact list? The only thing I can think of is that they have discovered my yahoo password, and are able to log on as me.

First you must understand what is a SMTP server.

A SMTP server is something useful that allows you to send emails from your computer without having a POP3 account. Used together with a group emailer you can send scheduled emails to a group of people from a list or data base, for eample once you configurated the emailer each time you have a party with a single click you send an invitation email to all your friends from your own computer. If you have a company you can notify all your customers each time a product is updated and so on. Of course spamers work exactly in the same way.

Now you have a SMTP server, a group mailer and a list. The SMTP server is a piece of software that allows you to send emails from your computer. The group mailer allows you to send the same email to a group of people from a list. And the list is just a list of email addresses of people that will receive your email.

The next thing is the configuration of the SMTP server and you must setup who is sending the email and you can put any address you want, even ones that do not exist.

In the example above about the company you set the email address of your company, but let now suppose that you have no company, only you are doing a service for a company from your home. You are sending the emails from your computer, but you don't want that someone that receive your email to reply to you, is not your business, you want them to reply directly to the company. For this you set the SMTP server with the email of the company. You are sending the email from your computer, who receive the email will see that who send the email was the company and not you and will reply to them and not to you.

Now the virus, a virus does exactly the same thing. It has a SMPT server, a group mailer and a list of email addresses. The virus is installed in some infected computer, the list can come together with the virus or the virus can acquire the list conecting to some hacked or malvare site.

Once a virus infects a computer it scans Windows address book and send all the email addresses to the hacked or malvare site creating the list and the begins to send spam or virus emails from your computer using the email addresses from the list. The information for the SMTP server of whom is sending the emails comes also fro the list, picked in a random way.

In you case as you use Yahoo web mail, I suppose that you have no addresses in Windows address book, so even your computer is infected the virus has no way to know the emails addresses that you use in Yahoo.

What probably happened is that some of your friends or people you know had is computer infected, he use Outlook for email and had your email in Windows address book and probably many yours friends and people that you know were also in the address book. The list was created with your email and many friends too, but not all.

Once the list was created and propagated, your friend can clean or shut down the computer and this will change nothing because the list is alive for itself and so you, your friend and other people that you know begins to send eamils one to each other from computers of people that you never heard in your life.

The person that had his computer infected not necesarly needs to be your friend, only your email addresswas in his address book.

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If you receive that your bank account was cancelled, how to enlarge your penis, the magical vitamineses, the lonely Russian lady and the classical and unforgetable Nigerian, it was not me that send the email.

Stupidity also evolves!