deleting viagra email disabled internet connectivity

I'm looking for information to solve my problem.

Here's what happened:
We have a Macbook computer. I was looking at my email online (earthlink). When I tried to delete and report as spam an email selling a drug (I rarely get these as spam filters normally get 100%of them), the email would not delete. When I moved it to Trash, it disappeared completely. It wasn't even in my trash. Then the problems began.

I was unable to load any other webpage. When I typed in google.com, I got the dialog box saying that google.com could not be found and that perhaps I had mistyped the site name. Same for any other webpage.

Also we could not send email using our macmail program.

We rebooted our wireless and the computer to no avail.

Does any body have any information about what this could be and how to fix it?

Thanks!

Welcome to Mac-Forums

There is something amiss here..on the surface, it is impossible for an email to totally take your Internet connection down even through reboots.

Now, if the e-mail contained some malware and you allowed to run on your Macbook, then that's a different story, but it doesn't seem like that's the case here.

Can you do some checking to see if your Macbook is indeed connected to your WiFi router and you have gotten an IP address?

I was connected to the WiFi router just fine, until I moved the strange message into the trash.

I just now received a phone call on my cell phone from "Computer Maintenance Department" (the phone # was 440-591-6018) calling about a virus that I downloaded.

The caller's English was heavily accented and difficult to understand. When I asked where he was calling from and why, he repeated the above. I told him I didn't trust the call and was hanging up.

Now I'm spooked. Sounds like they got some info from our computer. I didn't open any links, so I don't understand how this could happen.

Raz0rEdge said:

Welcome to Mac-Forums

There is something amiss here..on the surface, it is impossible for an email to totally take your Internet connection down even through reboots.

Now, if the e-mail contained some malware and you allowed to run on your Macbook, then that's a different story, but it doesn't seem like that's the case here.

Can you do some checking to see if your Macbook is indeed connected to your WiFi router and you have gotten an IP address?

Click to expand...

It seems that problem is with the WiFi rather than the computer itself. The laptop works with other WiFi's. Is it at all possible that an email viewed on a web browser, when no links were opened, could disrupt the WiFi connection?

Someone may have hacked your WiFi network. Is it properly secured? Do you have encryption enabled, and if so, what type (WEP or WPA)? If you don't know, my first step would be to find out.