It would not be additional spam to send a heartfelt apology. You can use that as an opportunity to provide your new e-mail address and let folks know that you will be shutting down the current account.

I don’t believe the hacking was your fault — I would be more concerned with the provider and finding out how it happened so that you can make sure it doesn’t happen again. Hacking does happen though — all we can do is our best to avoid it happening again. If your provider cannot explain this to your satisfaction I would close the account and consider moving to a more secure provider.

You have a good idea to only keep those addresses available for those you communicate with on a regular basis. You could always keep the full list off-line in another file in case the need arises. However, e-mail is all about the conversation and relationships — rare is the occasion (such as this one unfortunately) — where you would be e-mailing those you no longer have a relationship with.

So, go ahead — send a humble and sincere apology, note your new address and do what you can to ensure this doesn’t happen again. HTH! ;-)

I found your site helpful and was hoping you could give me some advice on how to fix an embarrassing situation.

My general email account got hacked and all (all 700) of my contacts got sent spam. This includes people who I’ve not been in touch with for years, but kept the email “just in case” and also work contacts. I feel awful about this.

Should I send another email to everyone in my address book to apologise or does this count as more spam? Should I advise everyone to block my email and get in touch if they want my new email address? Or should I just pretend it didnt happen and sanitise my contacts for the future to only include those I actually use?

I feel that I should act quickly to prevent it happening again. I am very tempted to simply close that account. I have already changed the password.

Your advice would be appreciated, I do try to be polite and am mortified that my account got used in this way.