Shop RadioShack for Great Gifts
Computer newbies: junk mail
junk mail
by midge5 - 9/6/07 11:34 PMI have firefox and thunderbird and have had no junk mail. now ,all of a sudden, I am getting up to 15 a day. Free lessons, mascara etc.etc..Why is this happening.? I have not added or altered anything.
Somebody sends this to you.
by Kees Bakker
- 9/6/07 11:36 PM
In reply to: junk mail by midge5
They found out about your email-address. That's why.
Nothing you can do about it except installing anti-spam programs to recognize them and move them to a separate folder.
Kees
junk mail
by midge5 - 9/6/07 11:55 PM In reply to: Somebody sends this to you. by Kees Bakker
Thank you for your reply. As you can guess I am not very bright at this so could you tell how to go about fixing it. I am scared to alter too much and make things worse. I have Comodo and Spybot and Ad-aware
Re: spam.
by Kees Bakker - 9/7/07 12:20 AM
In reply to: junk mail by midge5
You can't fix it, because it comes from outside. Like you can't fix the rain falling on you if you walk outside. You can only try to protect yourself.
Programs like:
http://www.spamfighter.com/
http://www.firetrust.com/products/mailwasher-pro
http://www.cloudmark.com/desktop/
are useful.
I don't have any personal experience with them. At my work they have a nice enough one, and privately I routinely delete nearly all mail with an English subject line and sender unknown to me. I'm Dutch, so practically all my mail is in Dutch and moreover it comes from known senders.
Read about it in http://www.spam-site.com/ for example.
Hope this helps.
Kees
junk mail
by midge5 - 9/7/07 1:18 AM In reply to: Re: spam. by Kees Bakker
Thank you Kees. I took your advice and downloaded one of the programmes.
Good luck with it. Thanks for posting back.
by Kees Bakker - 9/7/07 1:26 AM
In reply to: junk mail by midge5
It might be interesting for others if you tell your experiences with the program after a few weeks of use.
Kees
Spam filtering service
by mjkoz - 9/7/07 7:40 PM In reply to: Re: spam. by Kees Bakker
I personally use "Spam Arrest" and it works great! You can receive a 30 day free trial at http://www.spamarrest.com/ I have been using it for a couple years now and it has stopped all spam by 99.99%. The way it works is if someone emails you, they will receive an autoreply they must personally respond to. If they don't, and you don't manually approve them, it stays in an unverified folder online. You can even view your messages online before you actually download them to your email program. Rating from one to five stars, it would have to be five stars for me.
A friend of mine was receiving hundreds of spam a day! He has since thanked me many times for recommending the Spam Arrest to him. It's worth a try for you with the 30 day free trial. Good luck!
Inbox will provide that anti-spam service for free
by grannyQ - 9/7/07 8:24 PM In reply to: Spam filtering service by mjkozHi there,
I recently opened an email account with the friendly folks at Inbox.com. Currently rated #2 in the free email account world (Gmail is #1). They have a service very much identical to what you're describing called "Challenge/Response". Here's how they explain this FREE service:
Challenge/Response Spam Protection protects you against emails from senders unknown to you. If you choose to use it, such emails will be first moved to the Unverified folder allowing you to approve or block its senders. The sender of such an email will receive an email containing a verification link. After the verification process is completed, the sender will be considered approved and his next email will be delivered to your inbox.
There are a variety of other Spam settings as well. So far, I'm most pleased.
Cheers,
spam
by dscorca - 9/7/07 9:49 PM In reply to: Somebody sends this to you. by Kees Bakker
Give me your email address and I'll email you a great anti-spam program.
::wicked grin::
All those enchanting sign-ups ...
by Meezer123 - 9/7/07 7:34 PM In reply to: junk mail by midge5You can read the fine print in those sign-ups on the web until your eyes craze over and they will never actually admit the reason you MUST sign-up to access all their wonders and receive their super offers/newsletters/specials for members only ... is because they sell your info the moment you type it. It's their 2nd business. The spammers pay them for your info and, in turn, you become part of their food chain.
Advice for all NEWBIES! Use 1 e-mail address ONLY for your friends & family; tell them do not give out your address to ANYONE else!
Get a second addy for subscriptions, membership links & all those cute websites.
Get a 3rd addy to use if you shop over the net and only use it for your shopping sites.
You'll be amazed at who sells you out and how fast they attack your box.
Hope this helps ... ~^.,^~
Your ISP may be letting them through
by aaa11zzz - 9/7/07 11:24 PM In reply to: junk mail by midge5I was once with AAPT and had no Spam. Just before I left for two weeks o'seas, I received a notice from them offering their Anti-Spam program, for a price of course. I knocked it back, because I was not getting any up until then.
When I returned home, I found . . . wait for it ... 1,180 spam emails! It took me forever to cut them down, 40 at a time (ISP would not allow me to delete the lot at once).
I changed ISP to Bigpond and then the same thing happened, although to a much lesser degree. I changed again. So far, no spam, but then I have not been offered the new mob's anti-spam program as yet.
Anti-spam gear is no doubt the answer, but I object to ISP blackmail in this area.
I'll keep changing ISP until I find one that doesn't cheat.
By the way, forwarding all the spam to your ISP Support is maybe not nice but it sure shares the pain.
Enumerating Badness
by terrybee - 9/8/07 4:10 AM In reply to: junk mail by midge5You've received lot's of good answers, and many recommend some sort of software solution. But software "ENUMERATES BADNESS" and WILL fail. "Enumerating Badness" means: the software keeps a list (or lists) of all the known bad guys, or bad words, or... whatever. Basically, it's a list of "YESTERDAY'S bad news."
Read the "CNET Tests AntiVirus Programs" articles. If this was a good idea, the results would be "every package we tested caught 100% of everything bad, including 100% of all spam." It ain't happening that way, is it?
YESTERDAY'S list of bad news does not catch TODAY'S newest bad guy! Why??? The new guy isn't on "The List."
Imagine if the locks on your house used such a system and kept a list of "all the known bad guys in the World," and let everyone NOT on the list into YOUR house. Sound like a good idea to you???
Software can help, certainly. But...
1. The correct answer as to "why" was given to you by someone else: the spammer found your address somewhere on the Internet - they found you on a community website, or they got it from one of the newsletters to which you subscribe, etc.
2. Someone else gave you another good answer: use one address for family and friends, and another for "everything else." But, there's a problem with this specific answer: what happens when you start getting spam at the "everything else" address? If you simply abandon this address and get a new "everything else" address, you have to notify ALL those places you WANT email from of your new address... AND ONE OF THEM may be the spammer!
Here's a better suggestion - it's FREE, and it works better:
1. For your "everything else" email, go to Gmail and open an account. Let's pretend you're "fred@gmail.com" for example.
2. Let's pretend you're looking at the www.xyz.com website, and you'd like to sign-up for their free newsletter. When they ask you for your email address, tell them it's "fred+xyz@gmail.com" At CNET, you tell them you are "fred+cnet@gmail.com."
3. When gmail receives email, gmail will "ignore" everything to the right of the plus sign, and give the message to "fred@gmail.com." You get the messages.
4. Suddenly, you start getting spam. Let's say the spam is all addressed to "fred+xyz@gmail.com." Question: where'd they get your email address??? Certainly, they didn't get it from CNET, did they?
5. Go into the options of your gmail account, and tell gmail to IGNORE anything sent to "fred+xyz@gmail.com" and suddenly...
6. NO MORE SPAM from xyz.com! But, you still get email from all those other places you want to get mail from, AND you don't need to notify all the "good guys" of a new address!
One of the other nice things about gmail is: you can pull your email via pop3 (Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Eudora, etc) for FREE!
And it's better than waiting for some software package update their list of YESTERDAY'S bad news to include TODAY'S newest bad guys!
Junk mail with Thunderbird
by dave61430 - 9/8/07 7:29 AM In reply to: junk mail by midge5Thunderbird has some anti spam tools you can try. When you receive junk mail click on message on tool bar then mark as junk.
On the tools menu select what to do with junk mail. There is also a message filter option under the message filter menu item that will let you specify selected field contents and action to take. You may have to play around a little.
I used to be plagued by junk mail. After I upgraded my isp and signed up with hotmail I get virtually none. Be careful to whom you hand out your email address and do not use a real address if you subscribe to news groups. Sometimes your address is gotten from a compromised friend's address book, not much you can do about that.
Dave Cohen
junk mail
by midge5 - 9/8/07 3:59 PM In reply to: Junk mail with Thunderbird by dave61430I cannot believe there are so many decent people out there so willing to give a few minutes of their time to help someone out. It really restores your faith in the human race. Thank you all very much. I have studied all the answers and hopefully things will be better.
Use webmail
by mikebliv - 9/8/07 6:57 PM In reply to: junk mail by midge5I used to use Outlook and the Spambayes plugin but I found that they were still not enough. I consistently found that the picture only and the "story" extract spam can get through. Even 3 spams per week is 3 more than I want to see. So I had had enough and went to Google Mail. Their filtering is so much better that I probably only get 3 spams a month that reach my inbox instead of being automatically sent to the junk mail folder. Unfortunately, I also get about the same amount of legitimate mail getting wrongly treated as spam, but I think this is still so much better than using local filtering. A friend using Hotmail has a bit more spam per week reaching his inbox so I'm happy with my choice. I can still download my mail from Gmail using a POP client but I do this more for backup purposes than for reading. And with Gmail's POP compatibility, I didn't have to drop my existing email address, I let Google extract and filter it instead.
I don't clear my junk mail folder, Gmail automatically deletes any spam that is 30 days old. This way, I get to see how much spam I receive in a month. Currently it's at 87. About 3 months ago, it was about 40, among the lowest I have seen it (I think a big-time spammer got caught at the time), and 3 months before that, it almost reached 100. What I'm saying is, keeping up with the spammers is a big pain and I don't find it worth my time to locally manage it.
If using a free email provider is a bit of a concern, there are other organizations that can clean your mail for you, or maybe your own ISP will do this for a fee.
Mike
| Forum legend: | |
 |
Locked thread |
 |
Moderator |
 |
CNET staff |
 |
Samsung staff |
 |
Norton Authorized Support team |
 |
AVG staff |
 |
Windows Outreach team |
 |
Dell staff |
 |
Intel staff |
