Hotmail & Junk mail Question?

[hogen-deifar]

I have two hotmail addresses. One I've had for about 8 years and is my name and a dotcom address. The other is the one on my profile that keeps my name confidential. My surname is unusual so I like to keep a little bit of anonymity! I use the named one for when I'm ordering stuff or for formal things and the other for my friends etc.

Unfortunately a couple of years ago I transferred my broadband to Tiscali and gave them my named Hotmail account for a contact whilst I was ordering their service. A couple of months after being on line I received an email from them apologising but that they'd inadvertantly given out several hundred thousand email addresses to spam companies and mine was one of them!

I now get, on average, about 15 emails a day from various places telling them my online banking with them needs verifying, when I don't have an account with Barclays, Nationwide, Egg, etc etc. Oh and apparently I need a year's supply of viagra too!!! I think I've weedled out most of them and they now automatically go into my junk folder on Hotmail. So I tick them all and click on the "Report Phisching Mail" button.

Is there any way I can STOP these totally? I have never actually opened one of these mail. I just see the header, and like I say they go straight into the junk folder, but it's about 15 a day. I could just reopen a new hotmail, but I'm kinda attached to it because it's still one of the original dotcom addresses. Also, my Amazon account is set up on the address as are other accounts and I'd rather not have to spend a whole day changing all my settings for the various accounts.

Or do I just put up with them, continue to make sure they all go in my junk mail and just delete them daily???

Thanks for any help!

[Sean]

you just have to put up with it, you could get some filter I use Bit Defender on my home PC's but if I access my mail via the web I find around 50 Spam mails a day.

Sean

[RonProwse]

I use MailWasher this little application automaticly looks at there the item was sent from and checks it againast the spamCop DB, this then allows you to select all the ones you dont want and it will buck delete them from the mail server, thus no downloading them to your inbox.

It also allows you to flag frendly domains and addresses

Ron

[Paulus]

I have at least two layers of spam filtering.

Tiscali provide free spam filtering on my primary account all spam mail subject lines are prefixed [SPAM] and dumped in a spam folder which you can periodicaly check if you desire.

I have also used McAfee online protection for some years. It traps about 100-200 spams a day and is very effective. I pay about £25 or £30 a year and it is very good value for money. It also provides virus and malicious software protection.

I use 4 e.mail addresses regularly. One for business and presently receives no spam. A primary personal one which receives very little spam. An old personal e.mail which I use in spam danger areas like on-line survevys and enrolment. This one is heavily spammed. My old business e.mail is only monitored for reasons of espionage () and is not too badly spammed.

Spam is a fact of life and once your e.mail address is "outed" all you can do is filter. I only very rarely find bonafide mail has been trapped.

Paul

[nickb]

I think you should count yourself lucky that, having had the address for so long, you only get 15 spam emails each day.

I got sick and tired of trying to manage email that I downloaded to my PC and I've been using Google Mail for a couple of years now.

I'm really surprised when any spam at all finds its way into my Inbox (maybe 2 or 3 items per month). The filter is excellent and there are over 1100 items of junk in my spam box dating back 1 month. For a while I used to check them for false positives but have long since given up on that.

The search facilities are superb, as you can imagine and the privacy issues don't concern me at all. If you're using Hotmail, I'm guessing privacy isn't a major concern to you either so why not give Google Mail a go?

[nigelH]

Originally Posted by hogen-deifar

Or do I just put up with them, continue to make sure they all go in my junk mail and just delete them daily???

If they are going in your junk mail folder why not just ignore them?

There are about 6000 lines in my spam filter pattern matcher file and stuff still gets through although to get through they are now usually so contrived that I don't know what they are trying to sell me. (well... how many synonyms for 'larger' and 'measurement' are there?)

Perhaps the most cheeky was an email from 'my' ISP saying my account had been used to send a lot of junk mail and I should run the attached executable to remove the trojan. Sending that as if you are support@ on a domain name registered to my office Apache server so I am the ISP was a bit of a give away.

[Tricky]

Originally Posted by nickb

I got sick and tired of trying to manage email that I downloaded to my PC and I've been using Google Mail for a couple of years now.

Another vote for Google Mail. I used to run my own mail server at home but never seemed to get round to setting up decent spam filtering. I was getting somewhere in the region of 15-20 spam messages an hour. You can configure Google Mail to retrieve mail from a POP3 account so I set that up and it was catching all spam messages first time (well, maybe one message a month was getting through) and rarely showing false positives. I've sinced dumped my email at home and use Google Mail exclusively. I don't get any spam now, but that's because the account has only been active a short time and isn't on any of the lists (yet )

[bigfeller]

Another vote for Google Mail.

The only downside is you'll have to update your accounts with the new email address.

Most of the positives have already been listed, but one I find great is the amount of storage they give - I've currently got 6607 MB, am using only 30%of it and haven't deleted an email in 3.5 years. The searches are brilliant. And it's free!! Bargain!

[nickb]

Originally Posted by bigfeller

Another vote for Google Mail.

The only downside is you'll have to update your accounts with the new email address.

Yeah but you can take your time over this. As Jeremy mentioned, you can suck in mail from your other addresses via POP3 and then it filters that too.

My ntlworld.com email address still gets used now & again but I don't have to check it as Google Mail dowloads it into my Inbox (or Spam box)

[MartinJ]

Originally Posted by nickb

Yeah but you can take your time over this. As Jeremy mentioned, you can suck in mail from your other addresses via POP3 and then it filters that too.

My ntlworld.com email address still gets used now & again but I don't have to check it as Google Mail dowloads it into my Inbox (or Spam box)

Yet another vote for googlemail....it's spam filtering is excellent and generally is much better to use overall than hotmail....I have m domain forward to googlemail then to my isp email simply to allow me to have a cache of my email available anywhere and also to filter spam....could argue I dont need my ISP email at all really but I just set it up that way and cant be bothered to change it now!