If you can still sign into your online email account, sign in, and change your password as soon as possible. See my blog titled “Passwords”, posted on August 13, 2012 for directions on how to create strong and secure passwords, and don’t forget to change all of your passwords at least every six months, before your email account password gets hacked again.
Don’t forget to create a password for every account, which is unique to all your other passwords, to help prevent all of your accounts from being hacked, all at the same time. If you can’t sign into your email account, follow the directions on your online email account to reset your password.
After you have successfully changed your email account password, you may or may not decide to contact all of the people on your contact list. If you discovered that your email account was hacked right away, you may decide to contact all the people on your contact list, and advise them not to open up any attachments, or click on any links, that was in the spam email, that your email account sent them.
If you didn’t discover that your email account was hacked for quite some time, most likely everyone on your contact list, that received the spam email from you, already knows that your email account was sending out spam, and if in that spam email from you, that your email account sent out to everyone on your contact list, had an infected attachment, or a malicious link in it, that could possibly cause damage to the recipient’s computer, then chances are that any damage has already been done to their computer.
You will have to decide if you want to contact everyone in your contact list, to notify them that your email account was hacked, and you have corrected that problem, but the most important thing you can do is to keep changing your passwords often, so that something like this doesn’t happen again to this email account, or any of your other accounts.