Sept. 2003 cumulative patch!

[HH]

If this is not the correct forum for my question, please refer me to the
correct newsgroup. In the past few days, I have received hundreds of emails
from many different senders, telling me to download and install the
"September 2003, cumulative patch". This morning I received about 150 emails
of this sort. Is this happening to everyone? Something dreadful is wrong. I
would appreciate an email reply as well as a posting here. Many thanks.

 

[Terry]

Configure your settings to reject mail with attachments.
Never post your actual email address on the Web.

 

[Lockon]

If this is not the correct forum for my question, please refer me to the
correct newsgroup. In the past few days, I have received hundreds of emails
from many different senders, telling me to download and install the
"September 2003, cumulative patch". This morning I received about 150 emails
of this sort. Is this happening to everyone? Something dreadful is wrong. I
would appreciate an email reply as well as a posting here. Many thanks.

Hello,
What Bruce said!
Never post your real email address on newsgroup forums as spammers
pick up the addresses and you will be inundated. If you wish to get
email responses at the very least you should 'munge' your address.
This means adding something to your email address that would stop it
getting to your inbox - for instance
(e-mail address removed)
would be a recognisable way for other users to still be able to email
you but the crawler programs may not and lets face it if they collect
many thousands of addresses they are not going to sift through them
all. Best thing though is to open a free webmail account with hotmail
or similar and use that for public use and keep your precious ISP
email address for friends/family or whatever.
Get a program such as Mailwasher
http://www.mailwasher.net/
this allows you to examine the contents of your mailbox before you
download to your inbox and safely delete unsolicited stuff - it will
even compare the email addresses of senders against lists of known
spammers and flag them up so you don't even have to look at them -
brilliant!
Regds Lock