plagued by spam emails

adbp1

adbp1

adbp1

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Joined
30 Dec 2007
Posts
2,054
Location
Oxonfordshire
Nearly every day now for past few weeks im getting plagued by spam emails offering viagra and wanting me to go to random porn sites!
is it time to get decent firewall and setup to my emails?
which is best firewall out there to get? i dont mind paying or FREE but if im to pay i will probably get full security with antivirus too.
 
If you're behind a router, there's very little point buying firewall software.

AV is important, though those careful need not even have one, i do of course for peace of mind.

Spam usually originates from companies passing out your email to other 3rd parties. As such i have 5 different addresses for different things. So be careful who you provide your email to or have another account just for registrations and the like.

You also have bots that trawl websites for emails, so don't post your email on a public website/webpage, such as this page you're looking at now.

The only spam i receive is from companies i buy IT hardware from trying to sell me for stuff, i just use filters to plonk it in the trash.

I had to abandon an old email address for spam reasons. I know various friends and family that get tons and i do mean tons of spam, and i try to educate them, but alas they get lazy and plonk their email into any website that asks for it, resulting in more spam.

I have 1 email purely for personal use - no spam
1 for purchases - if i buy on overclockers for example
1 for ebay - rarely use that now
2 hotmail accounts for random stuff, i let hotmails junk filter deal with the bulk of the junk that way. I use these for registrations and the like.

a lot of websites will ask for an email address to provide content, in some cases you don't have to activate an account, so there's no need to give them your real email, they're only gonna send you rubbish. The forms will typically check to make sure it's a valid entry though, so just putting ' blah ' would fail, where as [email protected] would be accepted as it's in the correct format.

Pay attention to where you post your email and who you give it to and you'll not get so much spam. If you have piles of it already, i'm affraid it's pretty much too late and your email will likely be circulating masses of companies that want to sell you stuff.

Basically the way i have my emails set up allows me to determine how a given company come to have my email address, unless of course it's hotmail, but as i mentioned i expect crap to arrive there. If i get crap on my main (ISP) email i can narrow it down to set few places i have given that email and check their terms and conditions and confront them if i feel they've illegally passed along my contact details. It helps to also read such terms of a given website or company > before < giving them your email address.
 
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basically ive not given my address out to many if any sites/companies and all of a sudden its hit by spam, it always seems to be hte same person or domain and even tho i block and send to junk it comes back again, i dont really wanna go throwing away this account as ive had it nearly 10 yrs now.
 
Report the company sending you the spam.

Find out who hosts that companies domain and report them for abuse.
 
Google mail catches most spam, better than MS Outlook. You can import several e-mail accounts to it and of course, have easy remote access.
 
How you guys get soo much spam and i don't puzzles me.

I stick to the guidelines i set above and have 1 maybe 2 emails a month on the hotmail accounts, and none on my other accounts.

If a company consistently sends you spam the best thing you can do is report them, rather then rely on spam/junk filters.

If you only give out your email to select places, check their policies to see if they pass along details, if they indicate that they won't then contact them explaining they are the only company to have your contact on record and that spam is arriving, and as such you can only assume they have broken their own policy by passing out the information.

If you ignore it, the spam continues, and the company or individual carries on as normal, sending more crap to more people. It's good if you can report them for your sake and everyone elses.

Yes i appreciate that helmut, they are both different but for the most part if you are going to choose one, i'd personally opt for the hardware version as this will cover every PC in the house, software firewalls would need a license for each PC, will have a more negative impact on the PC and become more of a royal pain in the butt with the "XXX is trying to access the internet, do you wish to allow the connection?" popups and whatnot.

Perfect combination is both, choosing one, the router firewall option would come first for me always.
 
I use cloudmark desktop, couple of quid a month and is the best thing I ever found.
Try the trial out and see.
 
My mail email addy gets about a hundred a day but it all goes to a gmail account which seems to identify it very well so its not a big head ache.

Its the problem with having the same address for years, i've always been careful where I put it but it seems that doesn't help in the end.
 
do yourself a favour and get a gmail account

forward all other mail accounts to that one

just use gmail, the spam filter is amazing on it, plus no risk of getting infected, since it's web based


and the 'conversation' style filing it does of your emails is genious
 
Rikk said:
I use cloudmark desktop, couple of quid a month and is the best thing I ever found.
Try the trial out and see.
Click to expand...

Cloudmark is excellent.
We use it on our Exchange Servers (Enterprise version rather than the Desktop).
Install it and forget about Spam.
 
t31os is right, if you're careful you shouldn't be getting spammed but sometimes you're just unlucky. You get spammed from a word list by an email with embedded images and you're caught, you're on the spammers list :eek:

Another gmail user here, but if you want to keep your address try using thunderbird as your client, its filtering isn't amazing but it does a pretty good job and will do most of the donkey work for you. If you want to keep your address AND stick with whatever client you're using at the moment try POPfile (http://getpopfile.org/). It takes a while to learn what is spam and what's legit but its very good. Adds a "tag" to the email so you can filter it on your client (direct to trash, spam folder, wherever).
 
gads said:
Gmail is awesome at catching spam, I have about 1400 spam in my spam box and it gets deleted after 30 days I think.
Click to expand...
Yep I've got my domain and email hooked up on Gmail now, so it all gets filtered by their servers first :)
 
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