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Re: Spam mail
Spam identifies the "sender" using several techniques usually designed to bypass any spam prevention measures you might have taken.
So many people belong to mailing lists that if they delete (as spam) anything that has their email address as the sender, they won't get their own contributions to the list. This is easily overcome (even in outlook express) by setting up a mail rule which deletes any email from you that is not to the mailing list.
A lot of spam comes from compromised PCs and works by spoofing the email address that the spam purports to come from. The theory is that you're more likely to open an email from someone you know, but if the compromised PC is identified, it's easy to clean it. So the spammer tries the next best thing and picks up someone else's email address from the compromised PC's inbox or address book. Chances are, you'll know them or know of them, and open the email.
By far the biggest spam magnet is a usenet (newsgroup) posting. These usually try to change the leading part of the email address (the bit before the @ sign) slightly in the hope that it will still get through.
Just under 92% of the email I get is spam, and the antispam program I use picks up 99.75% of them.
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