My Email was hacked

First time ever, I am usually very careful. I was taught early on to never open a link or click on a pic embedded in an email. I scan my attachments before opening and I always delete my history and cookies so that my email is never remembered in any important parts of my puter, email account included. All I did was send an email to a friend from an account I rarely use anymore, asking him if he sold a pool pump and the minute he got it he also got a spam mail from "me" asking him for money. He called me right away to tell me and sure enough when I went to log in to my account it wouldn't let me.

What a PIA it was to call customer help and change everything around. Luckily the address book was years old and most had changed emails so most of them came back undeliverable. Stupid me panicked and deleted my address book before sending out an "real" email telling them to ignore the bad one. Once those bad emails were sent I'm sure that person was on to another and long gone. The Nudge was worried about the banking and ADP and the medical accounts using the same password, but those all had different log in names, so they were OK.

NEVER NEVER let a computer remember your password on anything that has information on it. Now, recipe and newsletter sites I don't really care about, I can always re-log back in..such as This Old House, Barnes & Noble, My Recipes, Bon Appetit...you get the picture. I am hoping that they weren't after personal information just my email. So far I changed the puter log in password and all my email accounts along with anything I pay a yearly subscription to.....MSN, Angelfire even though it is there site, not mine, it still doesn't hurt to change it all. Actually you should change your passwords every month, you do it at work, right?

I hope that someone learns from my mistake and doesn't become complacent on their computer, especially since the thieves are getting very crafty.