Not exactly spam or a virus, but annoying

[catswhisker]

Apologies if this has been raised before.
I am getting three or four really annoying e-mail messages every day. They have clearly randomly-generated two-word titles and are from names which are also probably made up; never the same one twice. I did open one, timorously, but I was so petrified it would bugger the computer that I shut it again before I'd made a note of what it said. But certainly, they aren't trying to sell me anything and they haven't crashed the computer (yet!) They just clutter my inbox and are getting more and more irritating.
What's the point? What are they trying to achieve? And anyone have any suggestions for blocking them? I've tried by the normal means, and it only blocks that particular fake sender's name.
:confused:

[Saab Dastard]

Welcome to the world of spam!

The only things that you can do is to avail yourself of some form of spam filter software, and get hold of a domain blacklist which you can use (and add to) in your email junk rule filter.

Oh, and NEVER open the messages and NEVER reply!

SD

[catswhisker]

In your debt again, SD. I thought Spam was always trying to flog something and these maddening messages don't seem to be. I'm wiser, but sadder.

[rotorcraig]

One of my eMail addresses is being hit a few times a day by Share Price spammers.

They don't want to sell you anything per se - they want you to buy penny shares in a company that they have selected and are now "hyping up". If enough people do then the share price moves and they make a profit on the shares that they already bought.

And their spam is pretty sophisticated - they put everything in an image rather than text and send from random eMail addresses / hijacked IP addresses so very difficult (impossible?) to effectively block :sad:

RC

[fabrifx]

NEVER answer to these emails..if you do,they'll understand that your email is active(at the beginning, they don't know cause they randomly choose email addresses) so don't answer...
another thing you can do is when you send emails,don't write your email address as they have programs that are able to read addresses on the net.. write them adding something xtra in this way: for e.g if your email were [email protected], you could write charlesNOSPAM.at.dot.com... or [email protected] and then write take away the 8's..