e-mail spam

[paulz]

My home PC has been sick for ages, and have only just been able to get it fixed. On opening my mailbox to my horror I have no less than 11,834 unread messages. All of them offering the same cr@p, Viagra, Bannk/car/house loans, Nigerian 419 scams etc. I wanted to delete the whole lot, but amongst them are messages I want. After an hour I'd only downloaded less than a 1,000. When I spoke to my provider, the slightly better than useless Telewest their is a site http://webmail.co.uk, that you can actually delete without downloading saving vast amounts of time, patience & cash! If for example I put parameters on my mail [eg ban any message that involves 'Urgent - business opportunity' would it ban all messages that just contained all three or any one of the three? Any easier way to ban the junk? Tho' I feel our service providers should do it at source, or are the more interested in how much we'll rack up in our phone bills?

[j2buttonsw]

You can buy 3rd party spam stoppers but these act like filters rather like the rules wizard in outlook/outlook express. I am not sure whether your ISP has a duty to filter spam but lots of ISPs (eg the new AOL) provide this service. I saw a programm on TV regarding spam and the lawsuit that Microsoft are issuing to 8 or so spamming companies and the advice they give is: 1) never reply to spam, 2) always simply delete spam, 3) never open the attachments within spam, 4) never publish your email address on a public forum (create hotmail or similar for this type of scenario) and 5) try an use unusual usernames for email accounts as it take spammers roughly 8 minutes to start spamming common names such as jane.smith@.. etc

[answerbok]

Illustrating J2's points 4 & 5; i don't mean to sound like a showoff but i get hardly any spam, maybe 1 or 2 a week. due to not putting out my email addy. However, i did once try to be dead anonymous with a an email addy of 'me.somewhere@freeserve and i was blinded by spam. so, good advice :-)

[j2buttonsw]

Something else you may try: I set up a Hotmail email account for my mum and it was bombarded with spam literally days after I set it up (notice how I used set up to bookend that sentence). She never used it in the end and so I let it expire. I recently reactivated it and I receive no spam at all!