A wee bit of clarification.......
A user trying to guess someones password by hand I don't consider an attempt to 'hack'.
Any decent password makes that near impossible to get in.
A 'hack' would be exploiting a weakness in the system, bypassing the password authentication, reading the password files or computer-generated multiple password guesses.
He wasn't doing any of that and he was only claiming to be in. he wasn't.
This is the worst nowadays
Any time you put your e-mail into the public domain you WILL be attacked.
For $10 you can buy a cd with 10million e-mail addresses.
The people who make these trawl newsgroup, forums, etc and extract e-mail addresses to include in the lists they sell.
Some viruses use your own address book to send more e-mails ( and spread the knowledge of you and your friends e-mail addresses to the 'listers' )
Best protection from these automatic scanners is to de-spam your address.
Soem of the common ones are to add the word spam or nospam to your e-mail domain address. BUT, some of the scanners are now removing the obvious changes like these
. Make it unusual and have instructions in your sig on what to add/remove. None of these are guaranteed protection and the industry does have to find a way to limit this somehow.