Windows 8 mail app, has my icloud account on but none of my icloud contacts depsite merging outlook and icloud on the icloud control panel... Help?? :)

Question

windows 8 mail app, has my icloud email accounton it, but none of my icloud contacts depite the fact that i have merged outllok and icloud on the icloud control panel

Answer 1

What you have experienced, though annoying, doesn't necessarily mean someone has hacked your account, though if you were finding that you were blocked because the sending limit had been reached that might indicate that you had been hacked.
What can happen is that when people receive emails which appear to come from their own address but they haven't sent they naturally tend to be concerned: however it's most unlikely that anyone has hacked their account, they've just been targeted by one of two common spammers' techniques: both arise because it's all too easy to forge the 'from' address on messages to be something other than the real one.
There are two methods. One is that the sender has forged the 'from' address to be the same as the 'to' address (so other people will see it coming from themselves, not you), presumably in the hope of confusing spam filters. It's harmless, if extremely annoying. Delete it (never ever answer spam or try to unsubscribe from it), and you don't need to be worried about it.
The other problem is that a spammer is forging your address as the 'from' address on a whole batch of messages. The first thing you hear about this is when you start getting bounce messages because the spam has been sent to non-existent addresses and is being bounced to you. There's no point at all in responding to it. It's infuriating but normally stops after a bit as they move on to another forged address.
There isn't really anything you can do about it: closing the account isn't really worth the hassle unless you are totally swamped, because you will have to tell everyone your new address. Apple can't really do any more than they already are about spam. However changing your password on general principles is a good idea.