Do they EVER run out?!

[Traab]

Ive blocked dozens upon dozens of spam email adresses, I cant even count how many, and they just keep coming! Its always the same set too, enlarge your manly bits, free pills/viagra, hi, click on my link, and people claiming to be communicating from facebook, even though that never shows up in their email adress. Every day I get a fresh wave of them, and every day I block those ones from sending more, only to see even more the next day.

[Cealocanth]

Hi please click on my link.


Just kidding. Sounds like your spam blocker is defective. I suggest you look for an upgrade or get a new email address.

Edit: Switching browsers may help as well, if you check your email with your browser.

[Haruki-kun]

They already have your e-mail address.

This probably means you're on their mailing list already, so... they keep sending stuff.

[Elfin]

No.
No, they do not.

Just make sure you look through them - you just might get some great opportunities. I should know; I myself just received quite an appealing job offer from the Postmaster General of Nigeria.

Can you believe that was marked as spam?

[RS14]

No, they don't.

Simplest solution is to switch to Gmail, which has very good filters. You can also use a mail client e.g. Thunderbird and set up filtering with e.g. SpamAssassin.

[Skeppio]

Best solution is to get yourself a decent spam filter (I use Gmail, and its spam filter is great). Then it's a simple matter of emptying the spam folder.

Unfortunately, there's no real way to prevent spam entirely, since they will never, ever run out of addresses to send from. On the plus side, some of the spam I get is good for a few laughs.

[Trazoi]

Spammers usually fake the sender email address so blocking them won't do much good. A spammer once used my student address to spam half of Russia flooding my inbox with bounce messages.

Best thing to do is set up a spam filter or switch to a client like GMail that deals with all that spam for you.

[Jimorian]

What e-mail service/ISP do you have? They should be doing this for you mostly, but even the best server admins miss quite a bit. Hopefully, they have a bayesian filter that will learn what is spam the more data you feed it by blocking addresses. If the ISP/service doesn't have this, look into e-mail software add-ons to filter for you.

But if admins were to ever let the true amount of spam through, even for just a day, people would be shocked and extremely angry. Blocking spam is one of those thankless, frustrating jobs that comes with being in charge of any site with e-mail or messages.

Elsewhere, I made the joke that spam was likely to be humanity's "gift" to galactic civilization, thus justifying the incoming alien fleet bent on our extermination.

[Traab]

I thought about changing over to gmail but ive got dozens of accounts all linked to my current setup and I REALLY dont want to have to try and remember them all and switch them all around. I mean, almost all of it goes to my junk folder anyways, its just, I was hoping they would eventually run out of email addys to use if I kept blocking them all.

[AsteriskAmp]

They pay people to create accounts and send it, they will never run out of accounts, just set your junk deletion to instant.

[factotum]

its just, I was hoping they would eventually run out of email addys to use if I kept blocking them all.

If it was that simple to stop spam, you think it would be the global problem it is? There are companies that provide "blacklists" of servers that are known spam sources, but I don't think you could use such a thing with a normal home account--you'd have to set up your own e-mail server to make use of such a list.

[Eldan]

No.
No, they do not.

Just make sure you look through them - you just might get some great opportunities. I should know; I myself just received quite an appealing job offer from the Postmaster General of Nigeria.

Can you believe that was marked as spam?

I was contacted by the King of Nigeria. He was greatly annoyed by all the Spammers pretending to be members of his family and wanted, with my help, to set up a business fighting spam mails. And he only needed 50 dollars to do it!

[Traab]

I was contacted by the King of Nigeria. He was greatly annoyed by all the Spammers pretending to be members of his family and wanted, with my help, to set up a business fighting spam mails. And he only needed 50 dollars to do it!

On the plus side, with all the enhancement links ive gotten, I can now have sex with a woman in another room! That comes in handy since I have hundreds of women begging me to see them naked. And with all the memory enhancing pills, as well as viagra, I can have total recall of every moment and outlast that smug bastard Sting!

[Mauve Shirt]

Nigeria doesn't even have a king, it has a president.

[Winter_Wolf]

You know, I really don't get much spam at all. Then again, I obsessively empty my browser caches, delete all cookies (except for a select few that are safe: GitP for example), and then run CCleaner after my browsers are closed, to get any little things that tend to linger. But I also don't go to a whole lot of sites on the internet, and use the task manager to end process any time my browser acts up and says "WAIT! are you SURE you want to leave the page?" Big ol' warning sign to just kill the process for me, right there.

HUGE difference in the amount of spam I get for some reason though. The days I don't follow protocol, I end up with about 10x the amount of spam as other times. It could just be coincidence.

[Zen Monkey]

I was contacted by the King of Nigeria. He was greatly annoyed by all the Spammers pretending to be members of his family and wanted, with my help, to set up a business fighting spam mails. And he only needed 50 dollars to do it!

Thank you for the money. It has helped my people greatly. The next payment will be even more helpful in protecting the land from the regent of Kanduzi and the violent Ndibi-wombi tribe. For a thousand dollars more, I will make you the Minister of Cricket.

[endoperez]

I thought about changing over to gmail but ive got dozens of accounts all linked to my current setup and I REALLY dont want to have to try and remember them all and switch them all around. I mean, almost all of it goes to my junk folder anyways, its just, I was hoping they would eventually run out of email addys to use if I kept blocking them all.

What about getting a Gmail account, and forwarding all messages from your old e-mail to the Gmail account?

[Elder Tsofu]

What about getting a Gmail account, and forwarding all messages from your old e-mail to the Gmail account?

Wouldn't he just end up with all the spam in his gmail account then? (as they are forwarded from a safe source as to say)

[Trixie]

Wouldn't he just end up with all the spam in his gmail account then? (as they are forwarded from a safe source as to say)

Yup. Besides, getting spam once in a while isn't a problem. The problem is when filters catch good mail as spam, I almost lost important mails a few times (on Gmail) thanks to that

And possibly a few times when I haven't noticed it in a spam folder.

That being said, you're being spammed only when you have common email (with common "head", like 'peter', say, [email protected], or [email protected]). If you have rare rare email that isn't the product of Ctrl+V, the amount of spam decreases thousandfold. The above with cache and stuff is computer voodoo, it shouldn't affect anything.

[Dvandemon]

Anyone else receiving spam concerning a bank transfer from an ailing foreigner? Yahoo organizes all my spam in a neat little folder, but with gmail I don't get any at all

[Trixie]

What, you never heard of NaSSM, Nigerian Style Scam Mail?

I thought that story of ill foreigner is too cliche by now.

[Claudius Maximus]

I think spam may really be a function of what you sign up for. I've had the same email address since like 2003 and I don't get any real spam at all. My mother on the other hand gets like 400 a day. My guess is that she filled out some shady forms that sold her email address.

This is all just speculation really, but I don't have any better ideas for why this is the case, since we have the same ISP and email service.

[Dvandemon]

And yet I have multiple spams from people that don't mind dumping their moneys on some stranger (whom they fail to realize is too young for such a thing)

[Trixie]

To the two above posters - selling mail lists is (almost) thing of the past, now they are randomly generated from the list of a popular words + numbers. You can have the same ISP/Mail provider, yet, if your word choice is uncommon, you get less spam. That's all there is to it.

As for the guy who claims he never has any spam on gmail - you mean lack of 'spam' folder option, as it is hidden on some wievs, or genuine lack of spam?

[grimbold]

welcome to the internet
apparently 1 guy controls this thing called the stormnet which creates 20% of all spam

[Mystic Muse]

I think spam may really be a function of what you sign up for. I've had the same email address since like 2003 and I don't get any real spam at all. My mother on the other hand gets like 400 a day. My guess is that she filled out some shady forms that sold her email address.

I personally get about 10 a day, but those are simply notifications that people have joined a forum I'm moderating that I don't want in my inbox.

As for actual spam, that I almost never get.

[Dragon queen]

Huh, funny. I usually only get a few spam during the holidays. And even then I only get 3-4.

[Sipex]

Nigeria doesn't even have a king, it has a president.

Tell that to the King.

[Traab]

For awhile there I was getting hammered with WoW phishing scams.
"Your account is going to be banned, in order to prevent this, come to our site here, enter your login information and secret word, and wait, thatll solve all your problems." It was pretty much nothing but variations on that theme, links to a keylogger that sounds really really close to the actual blizzard sites address, requests to enter all personal information, (half surprised they dont ask for social security numbers at this point) and all with varying levels of grammar and spelling. Especially enjoyable is when they misspell blizzard.

[Delorges]

Hey, I got these too! There basically the only spam/scam mails I got in the last months, so I guess I can consider myself lucky.