Can anyone advise? I am used to getting tons of spam on my hotmail account despite the controls. However I am now getting regular spam to my aol account which is unusual. God knows how they got this address but it's very annoying. Some of the stuff is links to dodgy porn sites and I REALLY do NOT want this stuff sent to me. I have put mail controls on and blocked the sender address but as it's always different addresses I don't know what to do next.

Any ideas?

-- Anonymous, January 15, 2002

Answers

Will leave it to others more knowledgeable than me re techie advice, but this has got to be the biggest prob on the web today. Like millions of others, I also get flooded with spam every day - including those dodgy porn sites. Each to their own and all that, but like Lynda, I REALLY do NOT want this stuff. The porn spam is especially offensive.

I know never-sleeping robot email harvesters trawl the web for email addresses - and, like junk mail, once you're on one spammers' list it's downhill from there. Also know the EC are trying to work out some sort of policy on this - it especially annoys me that these spam merchants put on the usual option to "Remove" from their list, when you know they don't take a blind bit of notice and move on to the next of a million new addresses to send out their crap.

What we really need is for someone to develop the web equivalent of a white noise generator, enabling us to hit "Reply" and blast them half way to hell. Normally I'm a pretty tolerant guy.

-- Anonymous, January 15, 2002

one tip (which may be too late for you) is never to reply to spam - to insult them or even to follow up their option th 'cancel'.

If you reply, this means your address is active, and is therefore more valuable. The option to cancel is usually just a device to get active e-mail addresses.

On a similar note, some sort of program seems to have installed itself on me computer which generates pop-up windows for casino web sites etc. This is bloody annoying

-- Anonymous, January 15, 2002

I've yet to find any way to block the spam. My usual email account is on aohell and has been averaging 5-10 spam messages per day for years. I just go through and delete (unopened) anything coming from an address I don't recognize and whose subject line doesn't appear to be from someone I might know. I usually try to remind people to whom I'm giving the addy to use a very obvious subject line so I don't delete their first message to me. Much faster, and less aggravating, than opening all that junk.

Also, there are a couple of programs around which install themselves in your browser. I know Comet is one, cause I somehow caught that while it tried to install and stopped it. Got messages to continue the download for weeks after everytime I'd open the browser. Very annoying, and I wouldn't buy any product advertised in that method specifically because they've intruded on my pc and annoyed me with their advertising practices.

-- Anonymous, January 15, 2002

One question I'd ask is - do any of you have your correct e-mail address in your internet browsers? If the answer to this is yes, then this may be how they have managed to get hold of your e-mail address. Malicious code can be put on a web site, so when you access it, the code will run and take all the info it can get from your browser. This is then added to one of the many "spam" databases that are used for mailing out this crap. The databases are then sold to various other parties, just like traditional mail shot databases.

-- Anonymous, January 15, 2002

How do you put your internet address in your browser? I use aohell as my IP but use Netscrape or IE for browsing the net.

I think some spammers must have programs to auto-generate addresses. Occasionally when I have opened a spam by mistake, I've noticed the list of addresses is alphabetized with only 1 or 2 letters changed.

-- Anonymous, January 15, 2002

I've got a freeby via the internet called 'System Cleaner' from here :-

http://www.webattack.com/Shareware/system/swdiskclean.shtml

Don't know if it's any good for the problem you have Lynda, cos I'm never bothered by spam, (touch wood) but might be worth a try.

I don't think it'll do anything automatically, but when I've run it, it doesn't half get shot of a lot of crap.

You might need to take a bit of care when it asks you to ok deletes, cos it looks like it can be a bit indiscriminate, but doesn't seem too brutal, if you watch what you're doing.

-- Anonymous, January 15, 2002

Thanks for your advice folks.

-- Anonymous, January 15, 2002

Good advice from Chevy - don't reply to spam..free download to stop Pop-Ups at www.panicware.com

-- Anonymous, January 15, 2002

Know there's no magic solution - and new laws would have to be pretty tough, innovative and wide-ranging to halt the activities of some guy in a back room in Utah, but...

Elizabeth France, Information Commissioner responsible for the Data Protection and Freedom of Information Acts, was on Simon Mayo's Five Live show yesterday afternoon. Knew it wouldn't yield much new info, but I emailed in anyway on behalf of the BBS to ask:

Q: "I know it's a worldwide problem, but do you have any role or views about the growing problem of email spam / junk mail on the internet?"

She replied on air: "Yes, it's an issue that we're all looking at worldwide to see what we can do about it.

"Quite clearly the problem when you're dealing with the World Wide Web is you've got an enormous number of different jurisdictions. And, although it isn't true that no law applies on the internet, it's deciding whose law applies and when. So lots of discussions going on about international codes of practice that can apply.

"From our point of view, the EU are, actually, amending a directive at the moment, which is going to make marketing by email very similar to the fax and telephone services that we've just talked about (ability to register with a central organisation if you DON'T want junk faxes / annoying sales calls - then companies have to check with them re their lists or face action) and make sure that people have the opportunity to say whether or not they want to receive them - and make that technologically much easier than it is at the moment."

Further info on UK data protection - and how to stop junk snail mail / sales phone calls in the middle of Monday Night Football:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/mayo/data_protection.shtml

-- Anonymous, January 17, 2002

Lynda, much sympathy. I really don't want my inbox cluttered up with mails titled "Incest Porn".

The problem is that the Internet is almost impossible to police and despite admirable efforts from domestic regulators and international organisations to set up regulatory frameworks, the truth is, if you close one website, it's dead easy to just open another one.

-- Anonymous, January 17, 2002

dougal can you pass on those site addresses to Gav please?

-- Anonymous, January 17, 2002

I already have them....in fact I started most of them ;))

-- Anonymous, January 17, 2002

.... I don't really want my mailbox cluttered up with 'delivery failure' messages from www.greenspun.com for e-mails directed to "dougal09@hotmail.com", but hey what can you do about it? ;o{I

-- Anonymous, January 17, 2002

One other idea is to abandon Hotmail and AOL - both are so spammed out as to be useless. I had a hotmail addy, and I got loads of spam from the day I set it up.

For e-mail, I tend to use web-based e-mail services at:

www.yahoo.co.uk

www.lycos.co.uk

They do not seem to suffer much from spam (in my experience I have not had any at all) because they are not .com sites.

Lycos is also good for UK users as you can send text to mobile phones for free.

-- Anonymous, January 17, 2002

.... to be honest I get very, very little spam on my Yahoo.com account - actually a lot less than on my blueyonder.co.uk account.

-- Anonymous, January 17, 2002

You could have spam, eggs, beans, sausage and spam. There's not much spam in that.
Bloody Vikings ....

-- Anonymous, January 17, 2002

You know Jonno, I actually prefer rather more spam than that. In fact, my all-time favourite is spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam,spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam,spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam,spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, and spam - with a side order of spam!

:o{I

-- Anonymous, January 17, 2002

Anyone using www.mailwasher.net

As highlighted in the Sunday Times yesterday.

-- Anonymous, January 28, 2002

It comes from some computer wizard in New Zealand and is simple to use. Free to download and can use indefinitely. He asks for a voluntary donation if you feel like it, to help him develop further products. But there's no obligation.

Mailwasher doesn't stop spam. But what it does is provide an extra layer of screening with the option to delete and bounce the mail back with a failed message, as if your account was now redundant. Doesn't work for web-based accounts at moment.

Took about five mins to download (at 56K) and another five mins to install and set up. You can then set up a Mailwasher icon on your desktop and click on it every time you want to check your mail. It activates your own dial-up, but presents a "pre-screen" with the option of deleting / bouncing spam. Once you've sorted that, you can move on to your normal in-box.

Was finally forced into action by a flurry of "new" porn circulars last week. These were automatically opening up the browser faster than I could delete them - filling the screen with graphic images. Also difficult to escape from. End up pressing "Ctrl / Alt / Delete" to free the screen.

Each to their own etc, but I don't want this stuff on my screen. At least Mailwasher puts up an added barrier, and allows me to delete this spam before it gets into my in-box.

-- Anonymous, January 28, 2002

Interesting. Does that only work on email you've downloaded? I use aohell for my regular account but the email sits on the server until I open each one. I usually go through and delete anything that looks like spam before I start opening email. It would be kind of satisfying to have a way to bounce that stuff back to the sender as an invalid account. Maybe it would remove my addy from their servers and help cut down the spam?

And on a slightly different note.....snail mail spam. Someone suggested sending back the prepaid envelopes to the companies that sent them. Either empty or with any old bit of newspaper or flyers (something that doesn't identify you). They then have to pay postage for no sales gained. I know...doesn't make much difference in the greater scheme of things, but I am taking a bit of wicked satisfaction in sending credit card spammers bits of adverts for tires, carpet cleaning, etc. ;-)

-- Anonymous, January 28, 2002

I've heard a suggestion that you send company A's junk mail to company B in the pre-paid envelope and vice versa!

-- Anonymous, January 28, 2002

Yep, you set it up with your server / mail details. It then downloads any incoming message on to the MailWasher pre-screen, though not at this stage into your own inbox. One line of info gives you the usual details re the sender, subject, size etc.

You can then preview the message / delete and bounce...or if you're happy with the spin dry cycle, move on to your normal inbox where normal non-spam message can be dealt with in the usual way.

Don't know if it'll stop the torrent of spam, and it could be a waste of time, but it's really satisfying to be able to bounce it back with a "failed" message...even if no-one will ever read it.

You can, obviously, check out the "failed" message by sending an email to yourself and bouncing it...being careful to uncheck yourself from the list of blacklisted senders, which MailWasher also sets up. And if millions of people started bouncing this stuff, you'd hope it would have some effect.

It's a simple idea, neatly executed.

-- Anonymous, January 28, 2002

...there's a screen shot on the MailWasher site which gives you a good idea of how it works.

-- Anonymous, January 28, 2002

And Ciara - the "marketing" blurb also states:

Why not delete the email directly off the server so you don't have to download it?

-- Anonymous, January 28, 2002

That's what I do already. Just liked the idea of being able to bounce it back to their servers as an invalid address. ;-)

-- Anonymous, January 28, 2002