Help. Plague of strangely named e-mails

Be_Happy

I've been very lucky over the past years and had no problem with viruses or hackers, but suddenly about a month ago I started getting strange e-mails. In every case they consist of a person's name and a weird subject. There were 3 so far today, the latest being named from Betsey Franklin with a subject of 'outwit termite'. In nearly every case, when I check for the sender it is a collection of letters followed by @ with such names as loire.fr or dawn.dk.

I always assume these are dangerous and delete them unopened, but sometimes curiousity nearly gets the better of me and I'm afraid of clicking on them by mistake. I use McAfee Security Suite and make every effort to surf safely, but Spamkiller is not detecting these and seems quite happy to accept them.

Is anyone else having this trouble or know what these are?

cwoodham

Spammers have picked up your email address perhaps from a website you have with your email address on it or perhaps its been passed on by someone you contacted.

Spam email seems to be an increasing problem which many of us have. Unfortunately there's no real solution to stop it.

I would suggest you try out a program which lets you delete unwanted emails on the server before you download them. Then there's less chance of problems getting onto your machine.

There are two good ones: Mailwasher 1.33 (this is the last free version of this program) from here
or Coffee Cup Spam Blocker

maforduk

I have no idea!
Try the following applications:
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=208562

cwoodham

I didnt really answer the question in my first post. The spammers have picked up on the domain names loire.fr or dawn.dk from trawling the internet. They put random characters in front of these then use this as bogus email addresses in the FROM field of their spam emails. The mail seems to be coming from the domains loire.fr or dawn.dk but its not really and if you bounce the unwanted emails they go back to loire.fr or dawn.dk and not to the sender of the spam.

So dont bother bouncing spam.

I get quite a few of these every day and delete them on the server.

Be_Happy

Thanks for help. I've heard of mailwasher and will look into using it. Other than that, I'll just keep deleting these as soon as they appear.