B said:
I have a spam filter which works ok but
I keep getting the same spam message (Viagra)
on my outlook express email
I have highlighted it and then gone to
messages and hit "block message" and
the message is deleted.
Next day I get the same spam.
I get no other spam
Is there something else I can do?
Help would be appreciated
Cheers
While it's not possible to completely eliminate spam (unsolicited
commercial email), there are some precautions and steps you can take to
minimize it's impact:
1) Never, ever post your real email address to publicly accessible
forums or newsgroups, such as this one. For years now, spammers have
been using software utilities to scan such places to harvest email
addresses. It's a simple matter to disguise your posted email address
so that these software "bots" can't obtain anything useful. For
example, insert some obviously bogus characters or words into your reply
address, for example: "(e-mail address removed)."
2) Never, ever reply to any spam you receive, even to "unsubscribe" or
"remove" yourself from the spammers' address lists; you'll only compound
the problem. If spammers had any intention of honoring the your desire
not to receive spam, they wouldn't have become spammers in the first
place. When you reply to a spammer, all you're doing is confirming that
he/she has a valid, marketable email address.
3) Be especially leery of any offers from websites for free software,
services, information, etc, that require your email address, or that
require your email address so you can "login" to access the offered
service and/or information. Many such sites are supplementing their
income by collecting addresses to sell to the spammers. For instance,
subscribing to CNN.COM's Breaking News Service will garner you a lot of
additional spam. (Of course, not all such sites have under-handed
motives; it's a judgment call. If the offer seems "too good to be
true," it's most likely a scam.)
4) DO forward any and all spam, with complete headers, to the
originating ISP with a complaint. Not all ISPs will make an effort to
shut down the spammers, but many will. One tool that makes forwarding
such complaints fairly simple is SpamCop (
http://spamcop.net).
5) Another useful tool is MailWasher (
http://www.mailwasher.net). This
utility allows you to preview your email before downloading it from the
server. Spammers can even be blacklisted, so that any future emails
from them will be automatically deleted from the server.
6) Within Outlook Express, you can add any spammers to your Blocked
Senders list, so the their messages are automatically deleted from the
server without being downloaded to your PC. Unfortunately, this is of
limited usefulness, as most spam comes from faked, random email accounts
with bogus random addresses being spoofed, and OE's Blocked Sender
capability isn't sophisticated to determine where the spam actually came
from.
7) Many ISPs offer email filtering services, so consult you ISP about
the availability and use of any such service it offers.
--
Bruce Chambers
Help us help you:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/555375
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safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. ~Benjamin Franklin
Many people would rather die than think; in fact, most do. ~Bertrand Russell
The philosopher has never killed any priests, whereas the priest has
killed a great many philosophers.
~ Denis Diderot
