You may not know this, but hotmail provides your email address @hotmail to spammers. Within hours of openning a new hotmail account I started receiving junk mail. If you want to stop receiving junk, switch to other free providers.
estrader- hotmail doesn't provide your address to spammers. what happens is: 1) if you set up an account, and it's in the public address book, spammers hit it. 2) if the account was used by ANYONE before you, and expired, and you used it, it's hit by spammers. 3) if your account is the same username as someone on AOL, earthlink (or formerly mindspring), or several of the other large providers, you're getting hit. for example, if a spammer has joe1234567 (at) earthlink, he will ALSO send to joe1234567 (at) aol and (at) hotmail, even if those id's don't exist now, because they MIGHT exist at a later date.
I use SpamCop to report spammers to the relevant ISP. It's very easy to use, and it's free: http://spamcop.net/ I also have found that clicking on the "remove me from the list" link actually works!!! Before I never clicked on those links, but then I read an article on Consumer Reports (I think that's where I saw it) that discussed how clicking on these links was effective. I used to get 20+ spam messages a day. After a couple weeks of diligently clicking/e-mailing requests to the remove from e-mail list, and reporting the spammers to SpamCop, I am now down to getting the occasional SPAM once every few weeks now. -- ITZ
consumer reports did a great disservice with that information. unfortunately, it's a known fact that there are a fair chunk of spammers who use the 'remove' list as VERIFICATION that you have a live address. they then sell the 'verified live address' list at a super increased price. the 'smart' spammers (an oxymoron) circulate lists of removed people / troublemakers (like me, who report spammers / get their accounts / websites terminated) and don't send to them...
oh, also, unfortunately, several ISPs ignore reports from spamcop. it's ridiculous, i know, but a fact..
Thanks for all the excellent comments and recommendations. I'll give Mailwasher a try. Hopefully I won't have to do the "wash" on a daily basis.
Half the time I am working on a MacOSX machine. The integrated mail client uses an artificial intellingence to kill spam. And with a little training it works pretty good. On my Win I use this: Nice App: http://www.elronsoftware.com/productfamily/msginspector.shtml Good trade, Dario
i would recommend http://www.cloudmark.com/products/spamnet/ in combination with MS Outloook. Filters 90% of my spam.
My AOL mailbox is also full of spam (50-100 a day). Every third email tells me how to get a longer or massive pen... This is a kind of terror. I think the person who invents the first plug and play spamkiller for AOL gets rich. 18 Million Members. Everyone get round about 50 spams a day. 18,000,000 * 50 = 900,000,000 Spams a day. <JOKING>Yes, please give me 1 cent for every spam a day. 900,000,000 Spams. Unbelivable, isn't it? Dario
I recommend that you www.spamex.com Instead of trying to wash / filter your incoming mail, spamex takes a more proactive approach. [NOTE: This only works if you start over with a new email address] spamex lets you create 100s of disposable email addresses , e.g. 8dlw-23dos@spamex.com WHen you register at a website, you create a new disposable email addresses just for that website. (Spamex has a toolbar hotlink to pop a dialog, making it easy to do) You can also create disposable email addresses to give to people. Instead of a random name, you can assign your own custom name to each disposable email address. Later, if you get some spam, the email message is annotated by spamex to indicate which disposable email address it was sent to. This allows you to find out who sold/shared your email address. You can then delete the disposable email address, which plugs the leak. I have been using this for almost 1 year now, and I almost never get spam. (Compare to before where I got 100+ spam messages in my yahoo mail account per day). Some tips: For your real email address you should use a long, difficult to guess name, because some spammers use brute force lexigraphic attacks where they spam common names and variations hoping to get a few suckers to reply/click the 'remove me from this list button', etc. Also, I give disposable email addresses even to my family because you never know if they will put your email address in some web form like "Send a greeting card to johnny@aol.com". Here is a 2/25/2003 review of spamex on PCMagazine http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,844064,00.asp You can also do a search on google for "disposable email" and you will find some other companies which offer this service. I only have experience with spamex. Fleance (Spam Free At Last!)