unwanted emails

scruffyone

I have an Hotmail account. Does anyone know how I can reduce the rate of junk mail. I either delete or mark as phishing but this seems to produce more immediate of the same not less. Any suggestions how I can dispense with 'facebook - be my friend', lengthening parts of my body, 'asking for details for sites I have never visited' and more of the same.

I look forward to receiving advice of what to do to reduce these, I know I can get rid of them altogether but why do they increase when I delete or mark as phishing.

Thanks.

giraffe69

You can get some software such as Spamcop to try to control it but I have found that Googlemail picks up a lot less spam than hotmail so maybe worth a try.

MothballsWallet

In my experience, a lot of spammers use Hotmail or Yahoo! mail addresses to send their garbage from. (I personally hate Yahoo! because they don't appear to do much about it from an outsider's perspective.)

kwikbreaks

Use Google mail instead. It has a very efficient spam filter and you very rarely see this junk.

Sadly this does mean that I miss out on the chance to earn millions of dollars from ex-presidents of various nations, have to be satisfied with the size and efficiency of body parts my genetics dictate, don't get special offers from obscure foreign websites, don't get urgent notifications to log in to accounts with banks I didn't know I had, and have to find my own !!!!!! but you can't have everything

aerostar

scruffyone wrote: »

I have an Hotmail account. Does anyone know how I can reduce the rate of junk mail. I either delete or mark as phishing but this seems to produce more immediate of the same not less. Any suggestions how I can dispense with 'facebook - be my friend', lengthening parts of my body, 'asking for details for sites I have never visited' and more of the same.

I look forward to receiving advice of what to do to reduce these, I know I can get rid of them altogether but why do they increase when I delete or mark as phishing.

Thanks.

Change your email, once it is out there very little you can do.

Plus it is quite possibly your fault, and your friends fault that your e-mail has been "harvested".

If you or your "friends" forward "stupid/joke" and ordinary e-mails to all and sundry leaving your e-mail showing in the TO slot and the receivers then forward to other people, it only needs one person to have a harvesting virus/malware and you have had it !.

An e-mail sent to say 20 address, they then forward it to 20 other people, thats 400 computers already, those 400 send it on again........ it will be on thousands very quickly.


You and your "friends" should learn how to use the BCC setting, and if you get e-mails with other peoples addresses on, and want to forward it, edit the e-mail and remove them.

Regretable the writers of the e-mail programs are at fault for not making it automatically BCC when it sees a list of "to" e-mail addresses.

Download a copy of mailwasher, it learns, and use that prior to using a proper e-mail program such as Thunderbird


Plenty of info on BCC, here is one link

http://www.hamra.net/fun/bcc.htm

scruffyone

Well, I do have a problem don't I. Aerostar - I do most of the things that you mention and am well aware of BCC which I use all the time but can't account for people forwarding emails to me. I haven't used a mailwasher so I will investigate this and thank you.

I try to avoid using Google in any of its forms and so it is back to the drawing board for me.

Kwikbreaks thanks for the humour and what a shame that neither of us will ever be rich as we ignore all the lucrative offers made to us!

I will also look at Spamcop.

Much appreciate this help, hopefully it will cut down on these timewasters and my frustration trying to see them off.

macman

Another vote for Gmail. i used to check my spam filter regularly in case a genuine email had gone there in error, but these I just empty it without bothering-it's more than 99% efficient.
I reckon maybe 1 spam email a week gets through-no more.

Burridge60

Doesn't your ISP provide free email addresses?

shelly

I have hotmail and have cut down my spam by adding their addresses to my blocked senders list.

cgk1

Burridge60 wrote: »

Doesn't your ISP provide free email addresses?

Using the ISP provided email addresses is always the worst option.

dodger148

I too have had this hotmail spam issue recently (on quite an old hotmail.com address) I ran Mailwasher to bounce the junk but was still getting 50+ spam mails a day.

Some of it was I discovered was destined for a person in the USA with a similar address. Very odd as I have had this address for years. hotmail must allow some sort of duplication.

As the hotmail address was I considered disposable I had no qualms in closing it and using another disposable from gmail.

If you wanted to stay with hotmail you could consider a "live.co.uk or hotmail.co.uk" address which should help with your problem