Accrington Web - Spam mail

Quote:

Originally Posted by Redash (Post 649291)

When you set up your email client, (Outlook express, windows mail, thunderbird, etc..) one of the boxes you fill in is your email address. This comes out at the other end, as the reply to address. You can put any email address in here, and you can still send it through your normal email.

If you want to try it -
Setup a new email account using your email settings, but fill in the email address as [email protected] or [email protected], then send yourself an email. It will appear to come from one of the above people.

Spammers are using this technique, but with the email address off their spam list. There is more chance of it getting through, if it's not from a known spam domain. Eventually all domains will be on the anti-spam blacklist then nothing will get through.

Useful information there Redash. Thank you! I wondered how it was done.

I avail myself of the email service provided by my ISP and my user name was 6 random characters. Thus my Primary email address would be something like [email protected] and it is only known to my ISP and myself and NEVER used anywhere else. No Spam received to it.

My Secondary email address also with random characters for the user name is used only for things like banking, PayPal etc. No Spam received to it either.

My Tertiary email address is for general use like friends and family and when registering with any web sites. Loads of spam now. When it gets too much it will be dumped and I will use one of the remaining two. Once dumped I will create another email address to replace it.

My Quarternary email address is dormant until I need to use it, as is my Quinary email address.

I have organised my email client (Outlook Express) so that my ‘Inbox’ receives the emails addressed to my Tertiary account and there are four separate folders, one for each email address, ready to accept emails for those email addresses.

I can access each email account via the BT website and any Spam emails I tag so that next time they go straight to the Spam box and they get deleted automatically periodically, if I don’t do it myself. Over time the system has learned which emails are Spam and which ain’t, so 99.9% of Spam emails get routed to the Spam box. I still get the odd one but once tagged as Spam it never troubles me again.

Once my ISP mailbox contains nothing but legit emails I use MailWasher to list them and if a Spam email has arrived a few seconds ago I tag it so that next time MailWasher will deal with it and then use Outlook Express to download them.

There is only one email address in my address book and that is my general purpose email address. If anything nasty manages to sneak into my computer and starts to send out emails to addresses in my address book, I will get one and also be warned that something nasty is on my computer. That has only happened once and that was a long, long while ago.

I get round not having an active address book by creating a Word page with the person’s name at the top (and it is saved under that name) with their email address below. I compose my message underneath and then click on the email address to launch the “New Message” window, copy and paste my message and away it goes.