chris singleton

I am getting increasingly pi**ed off with the amount of junk mail being received, 3-4 normally every day ranging from "Get your university diploma now" to "great mortgage deals".

I've got the junk filter on but they still get through with another 3-4 going into my junk mail inbox.

Does anyone else use hotmail and experiencing similar problems?

Is this a ploy by microsoft to make you pay for extra storage space?

Cheers

Chris

Mice_Elf

Yes.

I get spammed no end by those blinking things. My Junk Filter is on and I can't add any more addresses to it, as I'm up to my 250 limit..

It's a pain in the derriere, I can tell you... [img]images/smilies/mad.gif[/img]

red_dog104

Yup, same here. It's bloody stupid!

Mice_Elf

On the plus side, if I ever needed to "entice her into bed" or "enlarge the size of my pen1s / breasts" or "watch barely legal teens / frustrated housewives" etc...then my hotmail account is full of useful information...

Clare

Get a "Spam Punisher". I have to use it frequently because I have my own domain name. Every time someone sends you unsolicited mail, you can send a complaint to their ISP. If it isn't a bogus ISP, they may suspend their accounts.

Just a thought, I get some pretty nasty stuff.

mista weava

no problems for me - but then i never sign up for crap and i rarely visit sites other than hotmail and scoobynet!
weava

Mice_Elf

Clare - ditto. I used to send them back to their ISPs but got fed-up of receiving automated messages back or the "we're sorry but the address was fake, so we can't do anything about it" messages...

Clare

Weava, you don't have to sign up to crap to actually get it! They use "spiders" or summat to extract email addresses - Scooby Net has been targetted I'm sure, otherwise BT internet sell their addresses which I would not be happy about!

MarkO

It's been proven already that if you have an unlisted hotmail account that remains totally unused you'll still receive spam within a few weeks.

MarkO

Clare, I would imagine that your email address has been spidered from your own website - since you have loads of mailto: links on the pages. It's very easy to write an email harvester - about 10 minutes' work. The only way to stop them is to 'mangle' the mailto links in the HTML (using some javascript or something) - since parsing Java in a spider is a non-trivial exercise.

But then you'd know all that, being a professional web designer.

Mice_Elf

The best one of those I have seen is...

mailto:bert@knickers.company.com (remove knickers to reply)



I set up one account and as soon as I clicked to login for the very first time, not 5 minutes after creating the thing, I had 3 spam messages... [img]images/smilies/mad.gif[/img]

super_si

Hav u set the profile right?

I use Junk mail filter now, i used to get 100 a day at least

Si

mista weava

seriously i get no spam! have had the account for over a year now- am i just lucky?

MarkO

Very!

Best way of mangling email addresses in a web page is to do something as follows:

You can email me at
<script><!--
document.write('<a href="mailto:'+'me@some'+ 'domain.net?subject=SomeSubject">');
// --></script>Mail Me</a>.

This will create a mailto link to me@somedomain.net which is unlikely to be harvested. Note that the line breaks are essential.

[Edited by MarkO - 11/11/2002 2:18:21 PM]

mista weava

course now i have blown it! bet i get spammed from ar*ehole to breakfast time now!

MarkO

I've just posted to alt.binaries.erotica.horses with your email address, so you should get plenty of mail now.

mista weava

i do hope not marko! happy as i am thankyou v.much1

Markus

Dunno if this has been suggested but try the following:

Go into Hotmail.

Select Options

Under Mail Handling select the Junk Mail Filter options.

Set the Junk Mail Filter Level to Exclusive

Set the Choose what you want to do with your junk mail option to Delete junk mail immediately

This is what I have mine set to. No more junk mail.

only problem is that if someone 'real' sends you an email and they are not on your contact list then it will be treated as junk mail But... lesser of two evils perhaps?


The other thing to do is, again from options, select Personal Profile and make sure the share my email address, share my first and last names, and share my other registration information options are all unchecked. One last thing, again in options, select the member directory option and uncheck the please list in the hotmail member directory option.

has stopped me getting tons of junk.



[Edited by Markus - 11/11/2002 2:48:30 PM]

chris singleton

Will try Marcus' idea, don't mind a few genuine ones going astray, don't use account for business or anything important.

Cheers

Chris

rik1471

Hotmail is ****. End of story.

Mice_Elf

I concur...but handy if you don't want to give out home or work addresses...

alcazar

iTrader: (2)

Well I'm just glad to see it isn't just me that gets offered ***** enlargement!!!it was making me have an inferiority complex!
:
Alcazar

Mice_Elf

Nope, I got it and I'm female!

MarkO

You're the only person who replies, though.

I would say that the best solution for most people, rather than use hotmail, would be to buy a domain and webmail from a host (I'd say Titan, but you all know that). Then you can have unlimited addresses (e.g., whenever I register somewhere dubious - such as SN - I use junk@otway.com), access them via the web, and get all the benefits of hotmail, without all the spam. Not to mention the fact that most workplaces ban hotmail access, but they won't know about your personal domain at WebSense.

It'll cost you about £30 a year and is well worth it.

EvilBevel

Can I just recommend MailWasher here ?

It's free, unless you want to make a donation (I did, it is that good)

wwww.mailwasher.net

Not related to them at all in case you wonder, but it works very very well.

You set up a friends list, a blacklist, and let it work it's way from there. Most spam mails are listed with ORDB or SpamNet, and it checks every mail against their databases. It doesn't download the mails, it just looks at what's waiting for you at the ISP. You can set it up to mach your likes/dislikes etc. So mail waiting for you to retrieve either gets marked as "Friend", "Virus", "Spam", "unknown", and you can still intervene manually.

It can also automatically bounces spam, which can help to remove your address from the spamlists. It then deletes the spam without even downloading it, so less traffic between you & your ISP.

Wouldn't wanna live without it, and actually wonder why this isn't built in into the popular mail progs.

If you combine this with Mark's idea (junk@wherever.com when registering on different sites) you can really get up to 99% spam free mail.

Edited to take out excess wwww's from wwwwwww.mailwasher.net

[Edited by EvilBevel - 11/11/2002 5:52:51 PM]

MATTeL

I tried to look at the link and got the following message:

Access to this web page is restricted at this time.

Reason:
The Websense category "Tasteless" is filtered.


I am so going to have to look at this when I get home!

MarkO

Mailwasher is okay, but you have to run/check mails against it every time you check your mail. Fine if you d/l your messages once a day, but no good if you sit there connected all day with messages being periodically collected by your mail client.

BTW, wrong thread, Mattel?

ajm

I use a script I wrote myself in Perl that checks the messages as they arrive on my mailserver. If it likes the message it writes it to my mailbox, if it doesn't like it it exits and the message is lost in the ether for ever. It deletes up to 60 a day from my one email address!!

EvilBevel

Mark, I'm a cable **** and disagree.

I've set OE to not check mail ever, not even on startup.

Mailwasher is set to check mail every minute.

Just browse through the titles in the Mailwasher window, look at the mails that may be "genuine" after all, then say "Process Mail" (which brings OE to the top).

It's worth it just for the feeling of "take that, sucker" when you bounce all the ***** enlargement crapola