Googlemail Spam

humfer

Had an googlemail email account for just over a year now, but of late I have been getting around 50 spam emails aday. Its not too much hassle as they automatically go into the spam folder and I delete them straight away. Just wondering if there is anything I can do to stop them entering my account at all??

CHR15

You are lucky, I get an average of 200-250 per day.

The gmail filter is good though, it is very rare for spam to enter my inbox.

I completely ignore the spam folder, it would be a daly chore to empty otherwise. Just leave it and let it delete the spam itself

judderman62

It does however occasionally put stuff in there that isn't spam.

if you were happy to do it you could ditch the one you have and start again with a new account n see if that helps ?

J

ckerrd

I delete my spam folder about once a month, which is usually about 300.

I rarely look at the contents, although if I took up the offers I reckon I could be wearing a number of Rolex watches along all the extra length I can gain.

fwor

You don't need to get spam emails.

All you need to do is to make sure you have 3 email accounts:

One that you only give to friends and family. It must be reasonably unguessable.
One that you use for commercial organisations that you trust (e.g. banks). It should also be fairly unguessable.
One that you don't care about and you can use to register for anything you like.

Chances are that all your spam will appear on the third email address, so as soon as you get spam, change the address. You may occasionally get spam on the second (e.g. if you think you can trust Freecycle/Yahoo Groups) and it's a bit more inconvenient to change that one. You shouldn't get spam on the first unless one of your friends/family has a major spyware/virus problem.

ckerrd

Interesting thought

I have an email address that I give to friends and family only and that gets no spam.

my Gmail gets used for work stuff an does get spam, which all ends up in the spam folder.

I have other business email accounts which get no spam, but Gmail seems to attract some

frivolous_fay

I started getting spam to my gmail account when I used it on Facebook.

fwor

It does make you wonder if an employee at Google is skimming off email addresses and selling the list on.

One of the biggest lures for spam is if your gmail address appears ~anywhere~ in text form on the internet - possibly just at the foot of a company web page. The spammers pay people to run computerised "webcrawlers" which spend their whole time simply examining sites and following links to find any string with an @ sign in it.

I have been caught out by subscribing to a forum which, although never using real email addresses itself, held an archive which did.

If you need to have your email address out there on the internet, you might want to see if your company can present it as an image, rather than text, as that is ~much~ harder for a webcrawler to pick up.

CHR15

I believe the source of my problems lies within the Google network.

Some time ago (about 18months) I was investigating running a batch file on a secure NT domain.

I joined a Google Group for Dos commands and NT batch files.

To join you need to be logged into your Gmail account.

I eventually found my answer and unsubscribed from the group but even now, if I type my Gmail address into a google search it appears in the member list of the group.


That is a good way to see if your email address is sitting online somewhere waiting to be harvested, just type it into Google and see if there are any results.

Stubert

ckerrd wrote: »

Interesting thought

I have an email address that I give to friends and family only and that gets no spam.

my Gmail gets used for work stuff an does get spam, which all ends up in the spam folder.

I have this as well. I don't really understand why... its kind of frustrating as the account that gets all the spam i use regularly and i have a dump account so to speak that i sign up to things i think will spam me....and I get none on that! really frustrating.

nickj_2

if you need a disposable email address try the firefox add on trashmail