Spam, spam and no chips!

[PPRuNe Pop]

This has NEVER happened to me before. Just this morning I have received about 10 spams. Any ideas how that could happen? Have I opened a door unwittingly? The addy they are coming in on is one I use only for business or non stuff.

[BOAC]

Somewhere the machine of someone who has your address has been 'done', some one has 'sold' your address on or somehow an email harvesting robot has found your address in cyberspace and you have been recently added to someone's spamming list. One of the joys of the internet.

[green granite]

Someone you have dealt with has sold/had hacked their E-Mail listings, not unusual I'm afraid.

[Capetonian]

Have you been .cc'd on an email with many recipients? If such an email falls into the wrong hands there is a 'crop' of email addresses to be sold on to those who buy lists of them, such as spammers and scammers.

This is one of the reasons to use .bcc rather than .cc.

[PPRuNe Pop]

Oh great! Two questions please can I stop it easily?

Could a System Restore, back say 3 days, help?

I feel sick! :ugh:

[Capetonian]

A system restore won't help at all as it will only change your own computer but won't have any impact on anything external to your system. It's like trying to change history - you can't.

The only you can stop it definitively is to change your email address, which is likely to be an impractical solution. The next best approach is to get a spam filter and as you mark the incoming emails as spam, it will 'learn' how to recognise spam. There is a danger that you will get false positives so you will need to look from time to time to see if it has caught any 'real' emails.

Sadly spam it's a fact of life, it's the equivalent of air pollution in our towns and cities.

[FullOppositeRudder]

Oh great! Two questions please can I stop it easily?

Could a System Restore, back say 3 days, help?Last question first - no - not as far as I can understand the events.

Stopping it easily? That's a bit more complex. You can change your email address, but that usually creates lots of secondary issues, and is unacceptable in most instances.

I've been able to keep spam at bay by using a program which enables me to view emails at the ISP server before I download them, and delete and or bounce anything I don't like or want. The program is called Mailwasher, and you can read about it here (http://www.mailwasher.net/).

The idea is that by bouncing spam messages, your email address registers as a 'bad' one at the origin of the spam, and consequently gets deleted from the lists at the originating server. The theory is nice; I can think of reasons why it may not work, but in practice I found that it indeed does work. There may be other solutions; this is one which I have used for many years with good results.

Oh, yes. I should add that my primary ISP does have spam filtering measures which seem to be quite effective also.

I do hope you can put an early stop to this unwanted rubbish by whatever means you can.

Regards,
FOR

[BOAC]

Yes, I have often endorsed Mailwasher - brilliant! The issue with 'bouncing' from MW is that 99% of spam is generated by a computer programme and that does not take much notice of a bounce, if indeed it even sees one! I find the MW spam filters far more effective and even risk 'auto delete' on emails like 'V|AGRA @' (thinks WHY do I get so many of those............................:))

[BEagle]

PP - does your ISP have a web mail system? If so, use the 'report as spam' tool and with any luck it will soon 'learn' which e-mails to avoid.

Virgin net does a good job of barring spam - but I check the spam folder once a week in case legitimate e-mails have been wrongly barred.