My guess is that your email address, rather than your email account is being used as the from email address in spam listing. Any spam that is bounced or fails delivery is sent back to the from address, this is to easily faked, you can effectively put any email address in the From address.

Presumably you aren’t using webmail (?), which if someone had hacked/guessed your username/password they could be sending out email unknown to you.

Since you changed your password with no change in effect, that would tend to support my guess above. As it is unlikely that it would be using your email account or email program.

However, if you only use Outlook (are you talking outlook express ?) to send and receive email then the avast Mail Shield (set the sensitivity to High, do that now) should detect multiple identical email in a period of time. Your firewall (?) should also provide a level of protection by not allowing unauthorised outbound connections.

As Dial-up user I would suggest that you investigate getting an anti-spam program that is capable of a) detecting spam or b) marking suspect emails for deletion. This deletion is done at email server level before calling your email program to download only the remaining clean (not bounced emails), this would save you a lot of hassle having to download all this cr*p over a dial-up connection before deleting them.

I use a program called MailWasher Pro and whilst this is a paid for product has been great for me over the years when I too was using dial-up; I have only had broadband for a little over 7 months.

MailWasher doesn’t download the complete email to do its analysis, it only downloads the headers, a small part of the body (user configurable), it doesn’t download images or attachments and it views what is downloaded in text mode only.

There are free anti-spam options, google for them and see if they work independent of your email program, e.g. they filter the spam at email server level before actually download the remainder on outlook.