Way Off-Topic How?

[hitmancode47]

Hi everyone

Been getting a ton of spam E-Mail recently, its been happening for a few weeks now

Thing that anoys me the most is that i havent signed up for anything that would be considered spam, or anything that would be classed from the screenshot below:



Where does it all come from?

BTW its the same E-Mails all the time - images are all the same (Its images of a canadian pharmacy if that makes sence?)

google didnt filter this lot out. even though i set it to.

Any idea how i can block it all permanently? - or better still, find out HOW it got there in th first place?

[Shamil.]

Some site may have been hacked and you're email was in the DB?

Erm, maybe you posted it on the net and a bot found it?

[hitmancode47]

if a sites database was hacked, the sites i use would alert me about it, so i can gaurantee that its not that

as for bots, im very careful about my address, the only place that has it is vBulletin (For my License) and a few other trusted friends.

[Shamil.]

if a sites database was hacked, the sites i use would alert me about it, so i can gaurantee that its not that

as for bots, im very careful about my address, the only place that has it is vBulletin (For my License) and a few other trusted friends.

Maybe the site wasn't aware that the database is constantly being hacked?

[motowebmaster]

It could be just about anything. Something that hacked another site, or a friends PC was compromised and your email address was among the infobits picked up.

[beishe8]

BTW its the same E-Mails all the time - images are all the same (Its images of a canadian pharmacy if that makes sence?)

That could be the key. You should not see any images when the first spam arrived to you.(images should be permanently disabled)
You saw the first image,deleted the email.
They knew that the address is valid(Because of the call back from the image)
They sold the address for good money.

[Joe Gronlund]

I change my email @ every year to avoid this, as a home user with no domain, there is almost no stopping it besides using catches, phrases and wordings.
But you will never stop it, email addresses are resold, and even large companies do the selling...

[Wayne Luke]

The most annoying thing about GMail is all the spam. I get 5-10 spam messages for every legitimate one on that service and those are the ones that it does catch. There are others that it doesn't catch but I can't count them easily.

The only thing that I use that email address is for a few newsletters that I don't want in my primary email box every week. It seems that sending spam to random Gmail accounts is the trend these days. However on the other hand, using my MSN email address, I only get 3-4 spam messages a day and I use it a lot of places. So many that I have lost count.

[Dean C]

What are you complaining for? It's clear from your screen shot that the spam didn't hit your "Inbox"

[Wayne Luke]

What are you complaining for? It's clear from your screen shot that the spam didn't hit your "Inbox"

There are too many false positives to just ignore the spam folder. You still have to go through it.

[JakeS]

I think they initially "generate" the email and send an email, if it gets through without getting an "invalid" email back. (You know the one you get if you send an email to an invalid email?)

If it does they send more, if you open the email, and it has images, that's it. It knows it's a real email for sure. as it knows you just loaded the email.

My "live" email, which I never used, just set it up, never really used it, so it just sat their not doing much. Starting receiving spam even though I hadn't told anyone the email.

How to prevent? Well that's the tricky bit.

However, I use "Thunderbird", I've set up a whole lot of message filters, so it filters everything I want into nice folders. Mainly set that up due to mailing lists (Trust me, when you got hundreds of emails coming in everyday, you don't want them all stuck in your inbox, it gets a tad cluttered, and thus moves them to the mailing list names folder.

Also did this for spam, set up a few "Key words".. for example typical spam comes through as:

viagra
buy
cheap oem crap

and so on.

This is probably one of the easiest ways of "stopping spam" although it doesn't stop it, but it stops it bothering you.

So, if thunderbird, see's any messages set with the spam parameters, it finds them, and puts them in the junk folder. I also click the "junk" button, as that way it does detect junk even if it slips past my filters as TB learns that way.

I rarely go to the hotmail interface or gmail or any of those now, as I use thunderbird and have done for a few years now :-)

(Which is why when I go into hotmail now, I feel lost, I couldn't even find how to check the mail quota (How much storage you used) when I wanted to lol.)

Just my 2c.

[Dean C]

There are too many false positives to just ignore the spam folder. You still have to go through it.

You must be unlucky. I check my spam folder about once a week, and I've only ever seen one false positive (and I could see exactly why as well).

[boro_boy]

Hi everyone

Been getting a ton of spam E-Mail recently, its been happening for a few weeks now

Thing that anoys me the most is that i havent signed up for anything that would be considered spam, or anything that would be classed from the screenshot below:



Where does it all come from?

BTW its the same E-Mails all the time - images are all the same (Its images of a canadian pharmacy if that makes sence?)

google didnt filter this lot out. even though i set it to.

Any idea how i can block it all permanently? - or better still, find out HOW it got there in th first place?

https://www.boxbe.com

I use it and its free, its very good. Takes a few days to start working properly.

[hitmancode47]

www.boxbe.com

I use it and its free, its very good. Takes a few days to start working properly.

It requires my Gmail username & password. I dont feel safe giving it to sites like that.

Im probably going to get private hosting and use E-Mail from that,

[motowebmaster]

It's a personal decision, but for what it's worth I've been using the same personal domain/email address for over a decade. As you can guess my email address is more popular among spammers than a stack of Pinups

There are several email-filtering services out there. It isn't too difficult to determine what I use, but the concept is the similar regardless of the provider - have the the filtering provider do the heavy-lifting and restrict incoming email at your firewall to only their network.

I could cave-in a decent server just with the amount of email that I actually receive but my server actually processes only 40-50 messages per day, but on the outside it's thousands that never actually arrive to my server.

One would think this type of service is expensive, but it doesn't have to be - depending on what you're looking for.