When you say your email account is active, when was the last time that you sent and received email from it?
If you have not used it in the last 90 days it will have been deleted for non use.
As regards your contacts receiving emails from it. Is the account a BTYahoo email account. If it is you may have been subject to the Yahoo hack which happened a few years ago. If it was hacked then, your contacts details would have been harvested by the hackers and they are now sending spam emails to them.
The spammers are not necessarily using your email account to do that. They would be spoofing your email address to make it look as though the emails come from you in order to give the impression that the emails are genuine.
Now that the spammers have your contact list they are free to send emails to them when ever they wish and there is nothing you can do to stop them other than to stop using that email address and inform your contacts to be very wary of any emails from that address and they should treat them all as spam and delete them.
See link about spoofing.
https://lifehacker.com/how-spammers-spoof-your-email-address-and-how-to-prote-1579478914
