Why am I receiving hundreds of spam emails?

[iheartruby]

Over the last few days I have received over 800 spam emails - have I done something that caused this and how can I stop it?
eg system administrator - undeliverable.
mailer demon etc.
Thanks in advance

[chicklin]

I've abandoned one of my email addys cos when my comp died for about a week, I came back to find hundreds of spam emails waiting for me.

Every now an again I have a quick scout through the latest ones but its up in the 10,000's now!!!

I can't face going through them all, deleting, deleting, deleting....

All spammers should be killed and eaten....(and the dorks who invent viruses and unleash them)

[chicklin]

Just realised - I didn't really answer your question....well I don't know what you could have done to start this up....I don't know what I did either....I never answer any spam so I don't know why they pick on me.....

[squarebear]

It's because a spammer has used your email address as a bounce.

When a spammer sends out millions of emails to random addresses, he doesn't want to receive notification of all the failed emails, so he selects one name from the list, in this case yours, and uses that as a return address.

You are getting his notifications and I'm afraid there's not much you can do apart from wait until he finds a new address to use.

[chicklin]

what a bummer......

[Ethel]

I have not had one single spam email to my email address - not the email address I post on here occasionally.

The address is made of random letters and numbers - my first motorbike registration number - and I think it is because it isn't any form of proper name.

[Lacey-G]

I use hotmail.com and whenever I had what I think is a spam email I just hit the junk option, this also sends a message to microsoft and I have found since using the junk option to report them, they have stopped. Can I also say that I never opened them, just reported them as junk.

[figure]

Don�t Download External HTML Content

Spammers send their emails to millions of addresses at the same time. They usually have no idea if your email address is valid or not. However if you are using Outlook Express to view your email as HTML. The spammer will instantly know if your email address is valid when you open it. You see spammers include a small graphic in the email that is "pulled" down from their servers to your computer.

When this happens they KNOW your email address is real and active! So you get MORE SPAM!!!

Microsoft have included a NEW option to BLOCK all external content in an HTML e-mail, this option is turned ON by default in Windows XP Service Pack 2

It can be found by navigating to the Tools menu, selecting Options, and then clicking the Security tab.

You will now see the NEW "Block images and other external content in HTML e-mail" check box.

Now to those of you that like to receive your HTML emails, this may seem a bit restrictive. BUT please DO NOT go and uncheck the "Block images and other external content in HTML e-mail" check box.

To download external content for an individual e-mail message, and so view the HTML e-mail as it was intended to view it, click the *External Message Information Bar to download the external content that was included with the message.

(*External Message Information Bar - this is the yellow bar at the top of the email)

If you have ever used Microsoft Outlook 2003, then these new features of the Windows XP Service pack 2 will be very familiar to you.