junk mail

[Robbie]

Is there a way I don't know about to get rid of unwanted
mail, eg. porn? I have tried blocking certain addresses
and also seting my junk mail filter to exclusive, but it
doesn't always work for me

 

[Dan Royal]

Spam...the curse of modern man. None of the spam filters work perfectly
because the spammers are getting smart by putting innocuous words in the
headers that they can't catch, and they change email addresses each time
they send out, so that blocking an email address almost never helps. I've
tried a bunch of them and they nobodys really been able to come up with
anything that will catch more than 50% of the junk mail.

The guy that finds the answer to this problem is going to make a fortune.

Dan

 

[Bruce Chambers]

Greetings --

While it's not possible to completely eliminate spam (unsolicited
commercial e-mail), there are some precautions and steps you can take
to minimize it's impact:

1) Never, ever post your real e-mail address to publicly accessible
forums or newsgroups, such as this one. Spammers use software
utilities to scan such places to harvest e-mail addresses. It's a
simple matter to disguise your posted e-mail address so that these
software "spambots" 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 e-mail address.

3) Be especially leery of any offers from websites for free software,
services, information, etc, that require your e-mail address, or that
require your e-mail 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. (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).

4) Another useful tool is MailWasher (http://www.mailwasher.net).
This utility allows you to preview your e-mail before downloading it
from the server. It includes the ability to blacklist the spammer, so
that all future messages from him/her will be deleted from the server.

5) Within Outlook Express, add any spammers to your Blocked Senders
list, so the their messages are automatically deleted from the server
without being downloaded to your PC.


Bruce Chambers

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