So, how do YOU deal with SPAM?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Sage
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I had the same problem but the only solution i found was to set my hotmail account to "extreme" and now only people in my address book can get to my inbox, all thought i do still have to delte spam from my junk mail folder which can get annoying. :)
 
I was just looking at a website and this popped up.

Great, I want canadian drugs.
 
I remember when that was all over the news. I was getting e-mails from companies I haven't even heard of to get drugs from Canada.

OA
 
I feel I had to mention this, and this seems like an appropriate thread to mention it. (hence the thread resurrection) - but I feel it's a timely reminder since these things just don't go away...

You may need a Kleenex, for what I'm about to tell you is sad :( :boohoo:

There's a little girl... her name is Amy. She's just 7 years old (I'm filling up already :indiff: ). She has cancer :sick: AND a brain tumour :scared:... but it's not all bad news! You can help by simply forwarding an email! A charity which helps sick children will receive 7 cents for every person who receives the email!...

... so what's the catch?

SHE DOESN'T EXIST! And unless the charity uses some sort of homing-pigeon style tagged electrons, they are going to receive diddly-squat no matter how many people you forward the email to! Infact, the net result is that the mentioned charity will often lose money by wasting valuable time (and hence money) on dealing with enquiries about such 'cases'...

I'm stunned at how many otherwise intelligent people are still forwarding these things on (albeit in good faith), but it's starting to get right on my tits. What these emails actually do - apart from depress you (if you believe them) or annoy you (when you realise they are spam) is waste the valuable resources of the very charities they purport to be helping.

The advice from any reputable charity is simple: Inform the person who forwarded the email to you that the email is a hoax. If possible, redirect them to the website that verifies this (e.g. http://www.wish.org/about/chain_letters ) and (of course) do not forward the email yourself... if you are ever in any doubt, remember one thing: Google is your friend! A simple keyword search using some of the details in the email is usually enough to flag up a host of hoax warnings. The email I received about poor wittle Amy Bruce, for example, was even in French (?!) and I still managed to work it out...

It's a bit tricky, however, when you receive one of these annoying emails from a relative or a close friend - but it's all the more reason to point out that it's a hoax, since they deserve to know that they've been duped.
 
Just make another E-Mail account, I got like 40 of those... My first screenname has 500Emails, so I don't even bother deleting them all, making a new EMail should fix this spam problem.
 
Unfortunately, these emails are not regular spam that is generated by a random spambot... they operate by getting individuals to purpose-build a recipient list of people they know, and hence they are likely to use your most active email address - in my case, my work email address which I can't (and don't want to) change... the only effective way of dealing with this type of spam is to inform the senders that they've effectively been duped into becoming a human spambot... trying telling your mother that, however... :sick:
 
Gmail wins. Except now and then a legitimate automatic e-mail will get caught by the spam filter (e.g. last week the Monaco GP post-qualifying e-mail got caught in the nets, yet all the other f1.com e-mails got through fine).
 
They are awful. I'm really annoyed that there is one going around at the moment for Madeline McCann. Apparently she has a defect in her eye that everyone should see, but it's all a load of crap.

Sick bastards.

What is the gain from making these emails? Does this guy sit at home thinking "I made an email get sent to a lot of people, that's awesome!"? What a sad life.
 
Rameses Niblick III Kerplunk Kerplunk Whoops Where's My Thribble
They are awful. I'm really annoyed that there is one going around at the moment for Madeline McCann. Apparently she has a defect in her eye that everyone should see, but it's all a load of crap.

Sick bastards.

What is the gain from making these emails? Does this guy sit at home thinking "I made an email get sent to a lot of people, that's awesome!"? What a sad life.
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My sentiments exactly... It beggars belief that there are people out there who start these things off for no other reason than 'they can'... nothing better than an emotive issue to pluck the old heart strings. The real search for Madeline McCann is doubtless complicated enough without the thousands of phoney, self-serving, sanctimonious or even in some cases downright malevolent so-called 'well-wishers'... forwarding a spam email, especially in a real case, isn't going to help one little bit. If anything, it will only make matters worse for the same reason as the fake cases...
 
Poor Amy :guilty:
 
With a double 'e' and a double 'l' I get some rather interesting junk mail. Including several members form a book club e-mailing me to ask when the next meeting was.

Otherwise I tend to reply, there's some damn good viagra offers out there if you just look around.
 
What is the significance of those letters?
:confused:

When I get forwarded crap like that, I always go to www.snopes.com, where the hoax has at least a 95% chance of being listed. Then, I write a polite but lightly scathing email in reply, linking to the story and explaining the fundamental absurdity... and I make sure that I use Reply All.

Did that once to a person in my company who used one of our corporate mass-email addresses to forward some similar dross. That one went back to over 9,000 people worldwide, including the President, CEO, and directors of a multi-billion-dollar corporation.

I don't know if that cuts down on the amount of crap that gets sent around, but it sure cuts down on the amount of it that I receive...
 
Duke
I write a polite but lightly scathing email in reply, linking to the story and explaining the fundamental absurdity... and I make sure that I use Reply All.
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:lol: I love the 'lightly scathing' bit - it's almost like giving someone a 'gentle slap'...
 
Just use mailwasher and bounce it all back to whoever sent it. They soon get miffed at having it sent back to them. Guess they dont like having to delete there own email bcus it works like a charm.

AngloAmerican
 
It's funny how recieving an email turns normally intelligent people into complete idiots. I refuse to forward anything that says I should forward anyone else. I occaisonally get fake virus warnings from well meaning friends and there's the emails that say if you forward to a certain number of people some amazing thing will happen to you. Most of the time I just delete the emails but sometimes I will relpy with a link to snopes.com or similar site proving the email a hoax, usually I do this if I know that person who sent it to me will feel liek a right idiot for believing such crap.

The other thing I do which I do to stop random meaningless crap coming from people I have never heard of is send all my bulk emailings as BCC. I like to respect the privacy of my email recipients, Person A doesn't need to know that I have sent the same mail to Person B and doesn't need to have their email address. I also like to delete all email addresses from emails before I forward them.
 
Duke
What is the significance of those letters?
:confused:
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None, except they increase the chances of incorrectley addressed e-mails a million times over.

Some of the stuff I get accidentally sent is abusrd.
 
Touring Mars
... unless the charity uses some sort of homing-pigeon style tagged electrons...
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Slightly OT here, but this reminds me of rfc 1149 (yes that's a real RFC) and its implementation by this workgroup.
 
Blake
Gmail wins. Except now and then a legitimate automatic e-mail will get caught by the spam filter (e.g. last week the Monaco GP post-qualifying e-mail got caught in the nets, yet all the other f1.com e-mails got through fine).
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Gmail is amazing. It catches over 300 spam messages a month for me, with no false negatives and only a couple false positives per month. There’s probably nothing as effective as running a Bayesian system on a database of millions of millions of emails. 👍
 
I don't get spam on my gmail accounts and spam on my school account gets [spam] written before the email title and gets deleted when, it enters outlook.

My parents get a lot of spam via the isp email address, but i installed an antispam program and they automatically move to a seperate folder
 
Meh, I hate this junk forwarding crap alot to, and will usually mention it to the person I get it from.

In regard to general spam.. I have two accounts. My like, 10 year old Hotmail account I use for MSN messenger and signing up for Forums (FYI MOD Peoples, I will never get an e-mail from you, so just PM me ;) ) and a one I give out far less that I use for business, purchasing stuffs, and close contacts. It almost never gets spam (though I do get a fair amount of notices from Paypal, ebay, etc, but I signed up for those, so yeah)
 
Only ones I get is from companies/people offering stock.
 
I just delete them without ever opening them or editing them as "spam" as I figure that if you edit them as spam it's telling the company or whoever they have a live email address and will sell your address to others. So I just delete them.
 
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