spam help

[Spycam]

I'm getting a dozen unwanted emails a day. What can I do?

[Sharon]

I've been getting loads of these too and don't know a proper way to get rid of them. On my system I am able to 'bounce' them back to them so they also get junk mail from me too. But I do need a proper way of preventing these, lot's are from America and of a sexual nature. Have no idea how they originaly started. I must get at least 10 a day.

[MjO]

Hi,

Your concerns regarding Spam are probably the most talked about issues on the Web, and in short there is very little you can do about it, unless your mailboxes are on your own servers, in which case there are many types of filters that can be employed such as spam assassin, which have varying degrees of success. These days the WWW is driven by commercial agencies, and the Sex and Commercial Drug Supply Industry (Viagra and the like) form a greater part of this. Robots and Spiders roam the Net harvesting e-mail addresses from any documents, so it is important that if you produce web pages or the like, dont include e-mail address links. You will notice many commercial sites very rarely give you access to actual e-mail addresses, but, will in the main, provide Web Form Mailers - such as the one used on the Forum - to be completed and submitted through the CGI, this protects the actual e-mail address from spiders and robots, but, again can have security issues, because all the information passed through a Web Mailer can be recorded and archived, and you are reliant on the integrity of the Webmaster and Server Staff not to pass such information to any other party. There are very good ways of protecting against spammers, but unfortuntely these are beyond the scope of general web surfers, and are only really available to programmers knowledgeable about transfer protocols and POP3 and SMTP Servers. Like standard mail, once you get on a mailing list there is very little you can do about it, and would be better to change your e-mail address, and keep it secure!

Have two e-mail accounts, one, for one to one mailing, and one if you are likely to be using it for submission requests on the internet, in which case the latter can be quickly scanned for the expected mail and the rest committed to the trash can.

Regards ...

... MjO ...

[Sharon]

Thanks for that Mjo, Nice to hear from you again by the way!

[DavidBatty]

A simple way to manage your email account rather than changing your email address is to download and install the program Mailwasher. This program comes in two versions, the free one and the paid for version. Download it from www.mailwasher.net and let it delete the spam for you on the server before it gets to your computer. You also have the option to bounce the spam back to the sender if you want to.