I know that no one likes spam, and they always complain about it and how much they get of it. I have only gotten about two pieces of spam in my whole life. But, one of them was pornography, and that made me angry. How do the companies that send spam get your e-mail address and is there anything that you can do to stop getting it? I've heard that there is going to be a "don't-spam-me" list and spammers can't send mail to you, but I don't really think that would work. Any opinions?

The companies sending spam often make use of the web-crawling robots, that search the net to find email addresses of poor old people like you and me, add these to their databases, and then barrage them with spam.

On way you can avoid this is is by including something like '_deletemefirst_' in as many places as possible, such as your FT Forum profile. If you look at various people's profiles, you'll notice that most of them have something like that included in their email addresses in their profiles.

Another thing which I like to do, is having an email address other than my usual one. I'll give any sites asking for my email address, my alternate one.

Harish, Hotmail is useful for something, eh? I have a Hotmail account that I use solely for subscribing to things, and I managed to get 200 spams in 3 days. I agree that it is annoying, but I treat it the same way as the rubbish I get in my letterbox- a little program called Mailwasher bounces them all back to the sender. Hopefully it jams up THEIR mailbox.

Does this mailwasher thing come with Hotmail or can it be used for email accounts on other sites as well?

I have it set up on my Outlook Express.. I have not bothered with it on Hotmail. I just generally delete everything in there.

It is a downloadable program- Google will find it in a flash.

Any way of using e-mail that involves the messages being downloaded onto your computer is what Mailwasher works with. The purpose of the program is that you can assess and delete messages up at the server before they get to you. It avoids downloading onto your computer any spam that is just plain annoying, or any rubbish that might contain viruses.

I'd say a program with this feature is just as essential as a virus checker or a firewall, especially if you like to view your downloaded e-mails in HTML rather than plain text.

Some e-mail programs have the ability to view and delete e-mails on the server built in to them. You can't see all the message but enough to let you know what's junk and what isn't.

Ozzz - have you found that bouncing the mails back to the sender has decreased your spam level? After doing this for a while I decided that it wasn't making much difference so turned the feature off. I wonder if spammers take much notice of e-mails bouncing now because they know about programs like Mailwasher. Perhaps it doesn't fool them into thinking that an e-mail address doesn't exist.

If that is the case then I suppose all that bouncing will do is increase Internet traffic. I once saw this concern expressed by a spam filter program that doesn't bounce e-mails (they would say that though wouldn't they?).

I'm in two minds about whether e-mail bouncing makes a difference.

I'd say it encourages more spam, if the sending e-robot or whatever gets the advert bounced back to it, it'll realize that your email address is a legitimate and an active one, add your address to its database, and you might not be spared after that.

Just a thought...

It doesn't bounce the actual spam mail back. It sends an 'address not found' message back to where the unwanted email originated from. This looks just the same as the 'mail undeliverable' message you receive when you send an email to a non-existent address. Hopefully, the spammer (or automated sender or whatever) then thinks your e-mail address is not valid and removes it from their mailing list.

Thanks, tellywellies, this must be a pretty great program then.

I went to the MailWasher site, and downloaded the latest version. My only problem is, I have a Yahoo! email account, and I don't know what to enter in the 'POP3 Server Address' field. I tried 'http://mail.yahoo.com' but that didn't work.

So what should I enter there? And what does the address of a POP server look like?

The helpfiles describe how to set up the program better than I could and there is a section specific to Hotmail.

*EDIT* Sorry Harish misread your post there for a while. I haven't tried using the program with Yahoo mail or Hotmail. The benefits of using MailWasher on this type of account, other than for 'bouncing' e-mails, are perhaps limited. This is because both are web based e-mail systems that are managed by going into a web site. MailWasher's main feature (for me anyway) is protecting you from downloading any junk to the computer when you're using a computer based e-mail program.

The helpfiles do give instructions about Hotmail. If filling in the appropriate boxes in the same way doesn't work with Yahoo mail then it maybe doesn't work with it. The people who supply Mailwasher are very helpful so it may be worth an e-mail to them about it.

I checked out the FAQ page, which led me to a page on the Yahoo! help database of questions. It seems that getting a POP account on Yahoo! requires money, which is something my parents would never give me for such a cause. After all, I'm one of the lucky few I know who doesn't get any spam. However, I shouldn't rest on my laurels, I read in a newspaper that newer Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts aren't at the recieving end of spam, but the spamming will soon get up to them. My account is barely 2 months old...

...

Curse those awful spammers! (I'm tempted to use multiple exclamation marks here, but unfortunately that isn't appreciated...)

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Ozzz - have you found that bouncing the mails back to the sender has decreased your spam level?

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It seems to make little difference, TW, but it just gives me a very minor sense of actually doing something about it