Junk Mail

[tivster]

OK, I'm getting fed up with recieving 15 plus emails a day about utter crap.

I cant block the senders because they always come from different domains.

The question is;
Do I click the link on each email that says "unsubscribe" or whatever? I was told before NOT to as it would just tell the scrote that I was reading the emails and my account was active? Any ideas

Try this software (it's free!!) www.spampal.org/
Works in conjunction with your e-mail program - Outlook, by setting up simple rules...

Tivster

[Robertuk]

simpo one said: One of my PC gurus set up a spam test. He opened a new account and sat back to wait for the spam to arrive. When it did, he studiously clicked on every 'unsubscribe' and 'delete' link that was provided. Some people say this is a bad idea because it simply tells the spammers that your address works. However, he said that 90% of the spam disappeared...

NB I find Message rules (Message/Create rule from message) are rather more useful than simply blocking e-mail. And several people are no longer on my TVR mailing list becasue they put anti-spam filters in and forgot to tell me!

This is wrong. Maybe the first emails were from newsletters and other valid emails from the free email provider. Clicking unsubscribe is the worst thing you can do. They may send you a thankyou for unsubscribing
but trust me, after awhile you'll get mountains of spam. If SPAM is a problem learn to accept it.
Set aside two minutes per day to deal with.
Also make sure your email filters are working and setup right. I used to get 15+ SPAM messages per day,
now only one or two fall through my filters.

On a second note, you can also use ASCII to rewrite your email address , which may not be picked up by the email address harvesters. just as in HTML   is a sinle space, you have to find the code for he at symbol ( @ ).

Regards

[zumbruk]

Robertuk said:
If SPAM is a problem learn to accept it.
Set aside two minutes per day to deal with.

Sadly, this is an unacceptable "solution". I am currently bouncing over 1000 items a week from my main email address. It would take considerably longer than 2 minutes to deal with that. And I find even minimal levels of spam unacceptable. Spam is theft. Why should I accept people stealing from me to send me lies? Would you be happy to receive advertising literature through snail mail with postage owing? Because that is what spam is.

[5ltr-chim]

Sometimes a site requires you email address to continue
and you really want to go there but don't want to give your real address - I put a duff one in along the lines of : junk_mail@you_tw.it - a real person would see your intention but its a perfectly formed address as far as s/w goes.
What some people do is put their address on pages as :
[e-mail] so people will (they hope) see to remove the .nospam.

All a bit late now though - All I can suggest it to change your email address and be careful who/where you tell the newone to. - If you stop the oldone they should start to bounce and will eventually stop. Give it six months and you might be able to reuse the old one.

[grahambell]

I can recommend a programme called mailwasher, which not only tells you what you've got waiting in your mailboxe/s (including subject and file size) but also allows you preview messages and either delete or bounce the crap.

You can download it from www.mailwasher.net for free, though the chap behind it does ask for donations. Well worth it.

[Liszt]

I, like many, have my own domain, with the [e-mail] forwarded to my real email, which I never give out. When prompted for a mail address I give [e-mail] or [e-mail]. I can then easily see where the mail address came from. it is then a doddle to see when a mail has been sold/lost to the spammers. I then create that particular mail address and forward it to the ether (such as [e-mail] )

[jvaughan]

simpo one said:

One of my PC gurus set up a spam test. He opened a new account and sat back to wait for the spam to arrive. When it did, he studiously clicked on every 'unsubscribe' and 'delete' link that was provided. Some people say this is a bad idea because it simply tells the spammers that your address works. However, he said that 90% of the spam disappeared... NB I find Message rules (Message/Create rule from message) are rather more useful than simply blocking e-mail. And several people are no longer on my TVR mailing list becasue they put anti-spam filters in and forgot to tell me!

I did a similar thing, I actually found a site that allows you to download zip files of all the addresses that have been entered into the remove site programmers error). so now I have an accurate list of peoples emails that work.
Donot use the remove sites.

I filter mine though a bigfoot account.
The bigfoot account is the primary address, and I use Bigfoot's spam filters.