UPDATE: As of around 10:30 on 11 October, Critical Path are now exclusively dealing with BTi incoming mail. Yahoo! are no longer in the loop at all.

According to an interview given to The Telegraph, BTinternet's email services are being moved to BT-Mail following hacking claims.

We've just forwarded a spam report to the Bell South (part of AT&T) abuse address and got this for our trouble:

abuse@REDACTED SMTP error from remote mail server after initial connection: host gateway-f1.isp.att.net [204.127.217.16]: 550-77.74.196.254 blocked by ldap:ou=rblmx,dc=att,dc=net 550 Error - Blocked for abuse. See http://att.net/blocks

A list of the most popular topics hitting our spamtraps:

• Phishing.
• Fake pills.
• Bogus weight loss products.
• Search engine so-called optimisation.
• Fake designer goods.
• Many types of prepayment scam from the plausible to the preposterous.
• Car and vehicle leasing.
• Business training courses.
• PPI claims.
• Injury lawyers.
• Entertainment and events.
• Laser eye surgery.
• Electricity tariff switching.
• Spamming services (no surprise this one).

UPDATE 10th July: Yet more accounts have been hacked in the last 24-hours, so the problem continues.

We've seen a huge increase in spam coming from yahoo.com e-mail servers.

Many accounts have been compromised, more come in every day. There is much talk on the web about this and as of this morning the problem ain't fixed!

Currently the spams are punting links to fake pages promoting work at home or diet scams.

Both BTinternet (but only for the time being) & now Sky e-mail services in the UK are outsourced to Yahoo! so those accounts are also vulnerable to hijacking.

Our advice once hacked:
You MUST change your password immediately! If the same password has been used elsewhere then you change it there too as those are also now at risk. If you need a password suggestion: Think of a line from your favorite song (or poem if you like) and use the initial letters from each word, including capital letters and punctuation. Your new password must be at least ten apparently random letters for it to be secure.

Following a single complaint from our incoming server MX5 (which forwards no other mail into AOL); AOL in their wisdom have blocked the server:

554 CON:B1 The IP address has been blocked due to a spike in unfavorable e-mail statistics.

We are tmpfailing AOL's servers on MX5 so messages will be delivered to the alternative server and so we can still continue to report abuse to AOL. Here is the message in full (with some redaction) which we wish to report as spam: