emails from africa

[therubster]

hi all,

im not to sure on which section i should be listing this question.

i am receiving around 15 emails per week from so called companies/ charities etc stateing that i have been left millions of US dollars in wills, prize draws etc. all of the emails ask me to send all of my personal info, bank details etc including a picture of myself and some ask me to send a fee to release the funds.

i just delete these emails as they are obvious scams from africa but what i dont understand is how they got my email address as my email address is my works email address and we only send internal emails within the company.

any ideas on how to block these emails or how to remove my details from the senders contact list.

please help as they are doing my head in.

[daffy654]

You will just have to delete them without opening them and hope that they go away eventually.They will have got your email address from a randomly generated list,if you opened one of the emails it will have flagged the account as a live account and your email address will then have been passed or sold to other fraudsters.

[Ethel]

They haven't got your email address by any devious means.

They use computer programs that literally creates hundreds of email addresses an hour and hope that a percentage of them are right. eg [email protected]; [email protected]; asmity@yahoo absmith acsmith adsmith and so on

If the first part of your email address is a proper name then you are far more likely to get spam that if you used random letters and numbers.

Do not reply to any of these emails - that will simply confirm your email address is 'live' and they can sell it on to other spammers.

Depending on how you receive email you should be able to filter them out. Have a look at the email address of the sender. If the bit after @ is obscure (@nigerianscammers.com for example) you can add @nigerianscammers.com tto the filter.

If it is a common one, you can't do this - you would block genuine mails.

You can use a free program to help screen your email:
http://www.mailwasher.net/

[therubster]

hi, thanks for your answers,

my email address is my name and after the @ it is my comanies name.

i will have a look at the link witch ethal posted and go on from there,

once again, thanks

[therubster]

sorry for spelling your name incorrectly ethel.