Spam Problem

[telboy1938]

Hi Guys, I am utterly frustrated and very nearly giving up unless you can help me......I am suffering from heaps of spam which increases by the day. I have tried spam-blockers but still I get the un-wanted mail. My last attempt was to go through all addresses in my Outlook Express "Blocked" window and remove all lettering from and including the "@" to the left-hand side.. i.e [email protected] became just alfred.com . Alas, it doesn't seem to work because I'm still getting mountains of rubbish.
There is a possibility that I am expecting too much so to be sure I ask you this. If the spam senders address is blocked, will the mail be denied entry to my PC completely or will it still get to my Deleted Items folder which means I would still need to delete it manually?
I expect my friend ChuckFickens will be available to give me guidance again.
Many thanks....Tel

[grasscarp]

Why not close your email account and start with a different name. This worked for me. Now I have a number in the name and it doesn't seem to get random spam.

[boxtops]

What spam filter do you have? Our security automatically sends spam emails to our spam box - we still get them but at least they are not all mixed up with genuine emails.

[telboy1938]

I am using Mailwasher Pro at present but not finding it very satisfactory. I have to filter spam on their page before going to Outlook Express and still get spam in my deleted items folder. Changing address is an option but as it is a domain address for which I pay 40€ s per year, I would rather stick with it in the hope I could find a secure barring of spam mail.
If the spam senders address is blocked, will the mail be denied entry to my PC completely or will it still get to my Deleted Items folder which means I would still need to delete it manually?

[AlBags]

Have you logged into your webmail and checked the settings and spam filter stuff? It may well be not set correctly.
I mentioned this before I'm pretty sure.

Who is your ISP?

[slinky.kate]

i just read it quickly and thought it said 'sperm problem'

[AlBags]

Can't help him with that (fortunately)

[TonyV]

Spammers already have your addy so you need to either divert them to a spam box or set up a new address imo

[AlBags]

Check the webmail settings FIRST tho. It may be set to deliver anything!

[ChuckFickens]

Blocking spam senders rarely works well because in decreasing spam as spam senders tend to change the addresses spam is sent from often as they got blocked at a higher level fairly quickly.

You've said it's a domain that you own, so a couple of things you can do because dealing with a whole domain is a bit different to dealing with a single address...

Firstly, make sure you are have not got your mail set as "catch all" so you are only collecting mail sent to specific addresses @ your domain... i.e. if your address is [email protected] then you only want to be collecting mail addressed to [email protected] and rejecting mail that is sent to any other [email protected]. This may mean setting up several mailboxes with your mail provider and several matching account on your mail software.

I'd also make sure you are not using single word/name addresses at your domain because having a address like [email protected] is going to attract lots more spam than an address like [email protected].... similarly addresses like [email protected] are more likely to receive spam than addresses like [email protected].

The other thing for you to do is stop trying to block spam on your computer and try and block it at the server level, your current mail hosting provider may offer tools for this already, if not consider changing your provider to one that does offer effective spam filtering (any running something like spamassasin will be effective, also if any say they offer greylisting that is a very effective method)... have a look here under "Spam Filtered Hosted Email Services"..... I can't really recommend any of them as I have no experience of using them (I run our own servers and filtering where I work)

Finally.... you can probably set your mail software to auto empty your deleted items on exit to save you having to do it manually.