I seem to have a virus which has attached itself to my email address and is sending out emails on my behalf.  I have spybot, malaware and windows virus scan. all show my system to be clean, but this morning I had a whole lot more returned emails to my account, which was sent out some time this morning I guess.  This in turn has lead to the number of emails sent per day limit reached.  What else can I do to change this??

Our product team has identified the cause of this issue and it’s indeed malware. If your current computer doesn’t have Malware, then it’s possible that you got the virus on a computer that you have used to login to Hotmail at some point in the past. 

Check out this Solution article for more info about it and for ways on how you can make your account and computer more secure:

http://windowslivehelp.com/solutions/safety/archive/2009/04/29/recent-reports-of-account-hijacks.aspx

As a safety measure, make sure the computer is updated. To get the latest security updates, visit our PC Safety line link:

http://www.microsoft.com/protect/default.mspx

About the numbers of messages per send, please note that this is by design.  All Hotmail accounts have a sending limit. If you’re being prompted that you’ve reached it, you’ll just have to wait for the 24 hours to elapse and you can send messages again.  To know more about this and how you can increase this, check out this Solution post:

http://windowslivehelp.com/solutions/sendlimits/archive/2008/12/22/hotmail-sending-limits.aspx