junk e mail

[peter richards]

i keep getting these through , my spam filter catches a few but some still get in , but whats so annoying is it gives you the option to unsubscribe , but all that happens is the main site opens up .

is there any way to stop these permanently ?

[Branners]

Never a good idea to hit unsubscribe on spam.

 

The spammers have a massive list of email addresses or sometimes even guess them. When you hit unsubscribe it tells them your email address exists and the email got through to a real person.

 

You will now find you get a lot more spam as it is a confirmed email address.

 

There is no simple way to avoid spam. They can guess your name from the normal format of emails, or they can find it on the internet on forums, or they simply buy in data from any old company and try with that.

 

Make sure you have a spam scanner on your email (somebody like BT internet has one built in) and avoid posting your email address on the internet.

 

You will have to put up with some level of spam, the volume of spam out there is so huge and the spammers so clever that they find ways round spam filters all the time.

[peter richards]

ok john thanks i suppose its not to bad its only coming in on my business e mail addy , cheap watches is one viagara from a canadian pharmacy is the main persistant one ,

[Branners]

yep, viagra and cialis are the main ones. It costs them fractions of pennies to send thousands of emails so they just spam them out.

 

I used to run my own spam filters are work, but you just cannot keep up so I outsource my mail scanning now. Even then we find the email addresses on our web site get a spam or two through each day. There is no way to stop them, but you can avoid them through the approach above.

 

I even get spam to my Virgin Media account, which is an email address I have never used, has never been posted on the internet and it not in the usual firstname.surname style of Virgin.

 

There is no escape.

[peter richards]

thanks mate appreciate your reply

[mawby]

Also html emails with dynamic pictures in can be used to confirm an address exists. The image has a unique number/code and when your email program downloads it (i.e. when you open the email) the spammer instantly knows your address is valid. So make sure you email program is set to not download images unless you know the sender.

[edge]

You can set it so it filters out mail with certain words you choose to have filtered.

How do you do this and can it be done it hotmail?

 

So for example if you choose to filter out viagra will it stop them all?

 

tia

[mawby]

So for example if you choose to filter out viagra will it stop them all?

Unfortunately it wont. Spammer got wise to this so they use misspelling like v1agra to try and fool spam catchers. Some don't even put the text in the email itself, but instead use a picture of the word so text matching filters can't be used.

[edge]

Is it worth setting up to help filter out those extra few?

[peter richards]

got my spam filter with absolutely everything i can think of in there but they still get through