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JUNK E-MAIL!!!!
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
in General Chat
Does anyone know how those spam lists work? My Hotmail account is out of control. I get upward of 80 junk messges a day, so if I don't check it very regularly I could possibly miss messages that I need to get because the mailbox gets over the storage limit.
Now if I sit here and unsubscribe to every one of these messages will that stop the mail, or do each of these companies likely buy my address from someone else who gives it to them? Hence I get off one list but the next week they sell it again to another company.
Please help, this is getting so annoying.
Now if I sit here and unsubscribe to every one of these messages will that stop the mail, or do each of these companies likely buy my address from someone else who gives it to them? Hence I get off one list but the next week they sell it again to another company.
Please help, this is getting so annoying.
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Comments
That gets rid of about half.
I have got a Block list as long as my arm too, so that stops a lot of the routine ones. <IMG SRC="smile.gif" border="0" ALT="icon">
Moral of the story?
Never give your email address away to random sites, and always tick the box that asks if they can give your details to "reputable" companies.
As far as I know, emails are found on websites (like this one) and lists are produced.
I'm not sure of the exact mechanism.
The only reason I don't get loads of spam is beacuse the uni mailserver blocks spam (something to do with reverse DNS lookups).
Use the spam protection/junk mail protection thing in hotmail. You can also tick the box next to the email and click "block".
Replying is probably a waste of time.
Hope that helps <IMG SRC="smile.gif" border="0" ALT="icon">
I will try blocking every one that I get from now on. Hopefully that will help.
Thanks guys.
I changed mine about 6 months ago and haven't had any spam yet. I know it is a hassle, but worth it in the end!
Well,
I really like my e-mail address. It's easy for people to remember because its my whole name. Yeah, I know I'm lucky not to have alexca345392@hotmail.com
I might have to do it though, or just suck it up and stop complaining.
Blocking the addresses doesn't help, Hotmail only lets you block 500 addresses, and as I found out, that limit it no where near enough <IMG SRC="frown.gif" border="0" ALT="icon">
There was an amusing way I heard about to get revenge on spam mailing bots, but it requires a little hacking <IMG SRC="wink.gif" border="0" ALT="icon">
[ 24-05-2002: Message edited by: Kiezo ]
That's the bloody word...bots!
Tell me about the hacking <IMG SRC="tongue.gif" border="0" ALT="icon">
Basically the idea is to hack into the account of a bot that's mailed you, and send an email saying you're interested in whatever product to another account that's mailed you. Both bots will 'think' the other is interested in their product/service, so will send emails bouncing back and forth to one another. This only stops when one of the bots or the mail account crashes <IMG SRC="biggrin.gif" border="0" ALT="icon">
I've never tried it though. Don't quite fancy facing the wrath of a multi-billion dollar porn company lol.
can you program/script in PHP, by any chance?
Oh, and Alessandro, that's what you derserve for having a Hotmail account <IMG SRC="tongue.gif" border="0" ALT="icon">
Yeah, well <IMG SRC="tongue.gif" border="0" ALT="icon"> to you too. <IMG SRC="biggrin.gif" border="0" ALT="icon">
Good to see you're still around. Thought you left with the mass exodus of Ubers a week ago.
A lot of e-mails are sent to "unknown recipients" and you will usually only get an e-mail from a specific place once or twice before it stops, as it will assume the address doesn't exist or isn't used anymore.
If you reply, or attempt to unsubscribe then you will confirm your existence and make the problem a thousand times worse.
If you do this, you need to copy all the info they sent one address, and paste it into the compose of the new account and send it! It worked with me, and a couple of my friends who did it. I think it must confuse the automailer systems or something, into thinking they are getting their mail re-directed, so they just send it direct to the account they recieved it from.
Mail Washer is freeware, and it is easy to use to filter incoming mails very thouroughly. What makes it different though is that it allows you to 'bounce' unwanted mails exactly as if your email address didn't work. Even the worst spammers have to clean out the dead accounts fairly often, so tis is the surest way to get deleted from the spammers' databases.
http://www.mailwasher.net/
Oh, the good news is that tey plan to support Hotmail and AOL webmail accounts in a couple of months too.
secondly...ever seen the bit of a junk mail message that says "click here to remove yourself from our mailing lists"???? well i know for a fact that as soon as you click that link you are proving that you are a real person (a lot of the junk mail people send emails to random addresses in the hope a few of them are actual addresses) and that the email account they sent the message to is used. this will get you a lot more junk mail, even though it might not be from the same one you "unsubscribed" to; they will have several different addresses that can be put to work assaulting your email account with a barrage of crap emails trying to sell you anything from houses to lawn treatments.
and last but not least...when signing up for something like a free host or a community, make sure you read the little tick boxes.
some of them say "tick this box to receive amazing offers from other companies!!!" and when you leave a few of them un-ticked there are often ones below them that say "click here if you DO NOT want to recieve amazing offers from...."
blocking also helps to an extent...although im sure everyone has noticed that when they block (for example only) "mike@good-deals-4-u.com", they will recieve another junk email message from "sally@good-deals-4-u.com", when sally is blocked: yep, you guessed it; "stephen@good-deals-4-u.com" sends you one and so on and so forth.
sorry its so long winded...i havent had a chance to write lately so its come back with a vengeance:)