unwanted email

[Guest]

I recieve 10- 15 emails a day of unwanted junk. Usually about stock alerts.
Each one comes in and without opening it I immediately put it on block
senders list and delete it. However the same email will come back again under
a different name. How can I get rid of these emails for good?

 

[Malke]

I recieve 10- 15 emails a day of unwanted junk. Usually about stock
alerts. Each one comes in and without opening it I immediately put it
on block senders list and delete it. However the same email will come
back again under a different name. How can I get rid of these emails
for good?

Welcome to the world of spam. There really isn't too much you can do
about it. Check into whatever spam filtering is available on your mail
server (usually your ISP). Depending on how you read your mail
(web-based or with an email client), you may also use spam filtering
there. Thunderbird has a good Junk filter.

Here are a few links to teach you about spam:

http://www.mall-net.com/spamfaq.html
http://www.spamlaws.com/

Also check on your ISP's website for more information about spam.

Malke

 

[Fuzzy Logic]

I recieve 10- 15 emails a day of unwanted junk. Usually about stock
alerts. Each one comes in and without opening it I immediately put it on
block senders list and delete it. However the same email will come back
again under a different name. How can I get rid of these emails for
good?

You are wasting your time putting them on your block sender list. As you have already discovered the
spammers rarely use the same address twice. You need some form of spam filter or a better email client that
can do things like mark any email from an address not in your address book as spam. In the mean time just
delete them. FWIW I get about 200 junk mails a day and my spam filters catches about 95% of them.

 

[---Fitz---]

Try Spamihilator. It blocks all email until you add the sender to your
"Friends" list.

 

[Bruce Chambers]

I recieve 10- 15 emails a day of unwanted junk. Usually about stock alerts.
Each one comes in and without opening it I immediately put it on block
senders list and delete it. However the same email will come back again under
a different name. How can I get rid of these emails for good?

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).

4) 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.


--

Bruce Chambers

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