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Inundated with Spam
I done a silly thing 😕
A friend of mine has been advertising his car for sale on the Autotrader internet site. He’s had three emails asking him if they could buy the car and ship it abroad – they would send extra money to cover the costs etc. blah blah blah.
I told him it was a con and rather rashly sent out a rude reply using my own email address.
Since then I have been inundated with hundreds of spam emails. I’m pretty certain the person I emailed is responsible (hot)
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11 Replies
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Here’s your coat :lol1:
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save them all and post them back to him :lol1:
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follow the spam link to their website, (click, add me to mailing list) then paste in his email address. :lol1: :lol1: :lol1:
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yes.. more then likely phill
however i sold a TR6 abroad once, was a steering wheel thing -
I have set up an auto reply in my email – this automatically sends a reply back to every email I receive. I have had hundreds today so I am hoping this will reduce the barrage 😕
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The problem with an autoreply is that now they’re *positive* that your email is a functional one, and they can go about the business of selling it to everybody on the planet.
If you get a spam from a company or individual or corporation, etc., that you do not immediately recognize, do NOT click on the ‘remove me from this mailiing list’ link. All that does is send them an email confirming your address as functional. Some companies play by the rules and actually remove you, but a vast majority merely use that remove link as a confirmation tool.
Unfortunately, now that your email address is confirmed and "in the system", so to speak, you can expect your incoming spam to multiply exponentially 🙁 There is no real way to avoid the spam once it reaches that point. There are 3rd-party spam filters out there that help a little bit.. I used iHateSpam for a while, and it was pretty good, but it was subscription-based, and I had to let it go.
My advice? If it gets too bad and you just can’t stand it, your only real option is to make a new email address and guard it religiously. That can be a real hassle though, if it’s a business account.
It’s best to set up a ‘sacrificial’ yahoo mail account or gmail account, and if you buy something online or have to register or enter an email address to participate in whatever you may be participating in, use that sacrificial account. My sacrificial yahoo account gets 100+ spams a day. My "real" account only gets maybe 8 or 10.
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Interesting point – thanks for the advice. I think I’ll switch off the auto-responder.
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Phill, download spamfighter http://www.spamfighter.com/newsite/Features.asp they have a free version, and since I’ve had it, and whitelisted all my contacts, I don’t have to trawl thru hundreds of emails. They have a worldwide list database of known spammers, and it works very well. I bought to non free version and it works really well too.
Good advice above tho. Never reply or click the remove link as it is just a verification that someone ‘reads’ the email address. Big money in selling ‘verified’ email address data.
Only quick way around it is to change your email address, and abandon the other one.
Cheers
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You don’t even want to open the email if its spam that can tell them that the email is in valid too.
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someone told me that google had a mail account which was very good at filtering spam so you got very little of it but they said you had to be invited to join by someone rather than just sign up yourself, he was going to send me more details but as yet I haven’t received them.
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Googlemail is now open to anyone. Just go to google website and follow the link. Failing that, I can invite you if you email or pm me.
Cheers,
Jamie.
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