Forgive the late reply, I was sidetracked the other day, and forgot to come back here.
A few months ago, all contacts in my Yahoo account began getting spam emails from me. Nothing unpleasant thankfully, and contacting Yahoo support about it was a complete waste of time and yielded one suggestion, malware.
I fixed it by changing my password, which is what you've done. The only other thing is a malware check, but if the password change has noticeably made a difference, then you're probably good to go.
I sent an email to all my contacts asking them to let me know if the spamming was still happening, and it wasn't, so the password change did the trick.
I sent an email to all my contacts asking them to let me know if the spamming was still happening, and it wasn't
I had this happen to me and discovered the advantage of having a couple of old dead email addresses in my address book as the bounced emails gave the perfect notification of trouble
Current belief is that even multiple alpha-numeric isn't enough, partially because of phyiscal needs of users causing them to write down their passwords and leave them in the open.
A favorite sentence has become a good suggestion for a passphrase, with space and punctiation it makes it very hard to crack. I use a Keyring program (I use KeePass on Windows, Keyring on Linux and Secustore on WebOS) and have it randomize all of my passwords. Sometimes this is a P.I.T.A. though with a 15 char password that has / > . * ! etc in it plus Caps and Smalls Plus Numbers (Most of my passwords end up between 50 and 120 bits )