everyday i get more and more spam in my unicyclist.com web mail.i usally wake up to about 45 spam emails is there any way to rid myself of these?
just about a week ago it was only 7 or 8 but now its crazy.i dont go leaving that address all over either.does anyone elses account look like this?
My spam content is increasing also. It has probably tripled in the last couple of weeks. I think I’m getting 15 spams per day now.
Probably not the solution your looking for, but:
I have my Unicyclist.com mail forwarded to my Yahoo mail automatically and then use that one account. (That way, I can give people my “cool” address at unicyclist.com, but I don’t have to actually manage two accounts).
Anyway, yahoo has an automatic “Bulk mail” filter and it dumps all of the spam into the bulk folder automatically. I don’t even look at that folder anymore, I just empty the folder whenever I log in.
I guess I’m one of the lucky ones. I only get about 3 or 4 per week and I’ve actually put my address in my signature. The strange thing is that they’re all those ones from people wanting to do some sort of business deal with me. Who send these emails and why would they bother?
Andrew
My unicyclist.com email account gets zero spam. It also gets almost zero mail. I have never given out my unicyclist.com address.
Gilby doctors the reply to address when the forum messages are posted to the newsgroup so the spammers aren’t able to harvest your email address from the newsgroup postings.
My Hotmail address is the one that gets spammed. But the hotmail spam filter gets most of them and I’ve set up some additional filters to catch some that get through. About 5 emails per day manage to make it through both sets of filters.
I think what has happened is that both you and Harper have posted your email address in the body of a message (the email address was complete in the form of user@unicyclist.com). That message got posted to the newsgroup and from there the spammers were able to harvest the address. I did a search at groups.google.com to find the email addresses. You used to have your address in your sig. Harper got his email address posted in the body of a few messages.
Or maybe not. The spam experts have said in the past that the email harvester programs ignore the body of the message and only grab address from the headers and send to fields. Maybe they have started searching body of the messages now too.
Same with me Andrew. I get 3 or 4 per week and I’ve also actually put my address in my signature too. I hate Spam all the time. I had one not long ago in which is very similar the one I read in Spam forums of what Andrew Carter and Me of cause read about it. I am very lucky ones of cause too.
David.
Re: SPAM in Unicyclist.com E-mail Box (its out of control)
Spam Pal has worked wonders for me. It’s free software available at
I’ve been getting 400 spam messages a week (not at unicycle.com, of course).
While not perfect, this software filters out over 95% of it. For what it’s
worth …
David
stiller ( at ) quip ( dot ) net
i think ive been sabotaged…
Spam is evil.
Though I don’t have a unicyclist.com email address, my own email address gets plenty of spam. Part of this is just because I’ve had the same address for years. But it’s MY address, so the idea of switching to a different one, just so the spammers can eventually find that one, is not acceptable.
People in the bulk email business harvest email addresses wherever they can be found. Plus, your email address is likely shared by many businesses that tell you they are doing this in their privacy policies. Tell you, you ask? Not exactly. The wording is very subtle. But if you use free software you’ve had to register to download, or register at lots of Web sites, or own file sharing software such as Kazaa, you have given licence for some of those businesses to share your email address (and in some cases to install adware and/or spyware on your machine).
That’s just some of the ways you get on all those spammers’ lists.
Why do they do it, someone asked? Because it pays. Spam email is incredibly cheap to send out, and obviously generates enough response to justify itself. Not to us of course, but to the people sending it out. It’s like the really bad TV commercials you see on late night TV. Cal Worthington’s old used car commercials, for you West-coasters. Obviously these things work, or the businesses would not be paying for the airtime.
Don’t encourage spammers by clicking on links in spam emails or responding in any way to the ads. If I see something that looks interesting, I’ll hand-type the link into my browser, so there is no data sent indicating that I’m responding to one of those ads. Mostly I just delete it. But if we don’t do business with spammers, hopefully it will discourage them.
I use Cloudmark SpamNet (www.spamnet.com). Since installing it several months ago, it has intercepted over 5000 pieces of junk email. It puts them in a separate folder where I can examine or delete them. What’s cool about Spamnet is that it uses a shared database of spammers, collected from the choices made by all users when they click on spam messages.
I use Microsoft Outlook. When I receive a spam message that was not stopped by Spamnet, I simply press the “Block” button on my toolbar, which not only drops it in my Spam folder, but also adds that data to my user database. The longer you use it, the smarter the database gets.
Of course the spammers keep getting smarter as well, but the vast majority of my spam goes straight into the Spam folder. Oh, and while SpamNet is in beta, it’s free! Check it out and see if it can be useful for you.