OT- Junk Mail

[Ed Kolis]

Shh! We're not allowed to talk about harvesters!

{confused silence}

Oh, that's right, this is the SE4 forum, not MOO3

[Kamog]

I get tons of junk e-mail everyday and have to be constantly deleting unwanted Messages, something like 20 per day. I used to read them all but I stopped doing that because it's a waste of time. You can usually tell which Messages are junk by looking at the subject and sender. There's tons of get-rich-quick schemes, chain Messages, insurance services offers, credit card company offers, adult web site offers, university degree by mail deals, weight loss products, viagra solicitations, all sorts of fake prize win Messages, deals to sell you herbs or drugs that's supposed to enhance your anatomy in various ways, pyramid schemes, Nigerian letter scams, mortgage deals, etc.

Some of the the subject lines are cleverly disguised to look like a legitimate message from a friend or someone you know. How do all these people get your e-mail address? The mail filters aren't perfect and don't work that well. I found that the only way to stop all this junk is to change your e-mail address every so often, but that is inconvenient...

[couslee]

Originally posted by Ed Kolis:
Oh, that's right, this is the SE4 forum, not MOO3

LMAO.

or apolywonton

[couslee]

For starters, I never use my ISP email address for anything. I always use my Yahoo account. They have a farily decent spam filer that routs about 75% of the garbage into a bulk mail folder, which can be deleted enmasse with a single click. as for the ones that do go to the inbox, I either go down the list and just delete the obvious ones, and the more sneaky ones i report to yahoo as spam. I don't know if the reporting does any good, but it makes me feel better knowing that I at least tried. when things get too bad, it really is not hard to start another yahoo account, and do an addy book mailing letting others know your new addy. my Last addy change was in 2000. so the filters work fine for me. I don't blame the spammers that much, as i have no problem putting my email into a free pron site i want to peruse for a day. the spam from that goes to the bulk mail and I never have to look at it. I delete an average 50-70 emails from the bulk folder daily.

Spam is just part of the web. Just like commercials are part of normal network TV. they are here to stay, get use to it. learn to work around them and don't let them get your goat. otherwise you will be spending good money of spam filters when you could take that same 50 bucks and get SEV, or Moo3. lol

[Taera]

spam is a word associated with hotmail.
20 spammails per day is nothing. i had (have?) a hotmail account that was about 4-5 years old. i was getting 100+ spams per day.
Yahoo! is pretty good at getting rid of spam.
a friend of mine recommended me http://www.graffiti.net . if you dont mind graffiti.net in your mail address it is the best - absolutely no spam. had this account for 8 months for now, not a single spam letter.

[Will]

The address was definitely harvested by a spider bot. The mail server is part of a University network, so the owners didn't sell it, and I've only recieved Messages originating from the same server. So the only possible way that the address got on spam lists is because some bot randomly happened upon it. Well, someone else could have sold the 50 or so addresses to a spammer, but I doubt that.

About the Hotmail accounts, I've suspected this for a while, but never really bothered taking time to prove it (set up dummy account, send mail from Hotmail accounts, wait to see if spam arrives). That's why I don't really send mail out of my Hotmail accounts, I just recieve sign-up confirmations.

Like I said, I just wanted to rant about how sad it is when a company resorts to a very unpopular advertising method to sell a product designed (supposedly) to block that same advertising method.

Personally, I never really understood why spammers continue to just buy any address they can and send several different ads to them. They say that the "0.001% response is enough to compensate for the costs". Well, why not work on sending to addresses that might even remotely be interested in responding? Changing 0.001% to .5% has to be more profitable, right? And, you get the added bonus of pissing fewer people off. For example, there are several ads marketing certain ways to enhance physical aspects that are specific to only a specific gender, within a certain age range, with an income level that allows for the frivolous expence of that enhancement. Send to just the people that fit into those catagories, and the 0.001% could turn to .5%. Maybe. But no, I have to recieve 50 Messages a day that inform me of a new way to make my chest bigger, and they ain't talking about a new exercise program.

*/rant*

[Fyron]

Umm... I get almost no spam emails with my hotmail account. You people just don't do it right.