Unwanted e-mails

[goldstar]

Several weeks ago I posted a thread regarding unwanted phone calls and got a lot of good suggestions and advice from many of you. For the past several months I've been getting an exorbitant number of e-mails trying to sell me brain pills, free website designs and, of course, viagra.. How do they know I'm a male :?

Anyone have any quick fixes for these unwanted e-mails? Seems like they come different senders every day.

 

[Dennis Alwon]

They don't know you are a male. They just send out a mass mailing and some may be male and others not. They don't care. You can set up a spam folder but I find it just as easy to just delete them without opening them.

Another trick is to have 2 email accounts. One that you never use except when you have to supply one online. The other is just for you personally or the business.

 

[goldstar]

I know a lot of them are forwarded to me via my local chamber of commerce, for which I am the webmaster.

 

[infinity]

Gmail has some of the best free spam filtering. You can use Gmail to retrieve your mail from other sources. I get almost zero spam.

 

[Fulthrotl]

Gmail has some of the best free spam filtering. You can use Gmail to retrieve your mail from other sources. I get almost zero spam.

as does apple. i get very little email spam, to be honest.

i got a peek at what my unfiltered inflow looks like a short
while ago. geez. 200+ items a day.

 

[active1]

At one time I had a email forwarding service.
What you did, every time you provided your email it would generate a unique email address.
Then forward the email to you.
That would work good for making 1 time orders, filling out an information request, providing email to download a sample, etc.
Some would start to send you mail or worse sell your information.
With the program all you had to do is turn off the forwarding for that particular offender.
Forgot the name of it.

Another way is to create more email accounts depending on use.

 

[cowboyjwc]

I have yahoo and very little of that stuff get's through to my regular in box, but I get 50 plus a day that go to the spam box. It takes time as you have to go to each one and block it, problem is, as you stated, that they simply send it from a different address. I usually breeze through my spam just in case, since I do a lot of volunteer work and every once in a while I will find one that shouldn't be there.

 

[crispysonofa]

Also you can switch web browsers to something like firefox. Add extensions that increase privacy and block trackers. Many websites have scripts running in the background that collect information about you, this is mainly done for advertising purposes but can result in lots of unwanted emails. Also make sure there is no adware/viruses on your computer, if your running windows ESET has one of the best products on the market. Or if you want to be even more secure you could install a distro of linux like UBUNTU and forget about viruses, at least for now. You can install UBUNTU alongside windows so you can still run windows when you need it. But for daily tasks such as email or web browsing you can feel much more secure on linux. Many versions of linux are very user friendly and are much easier to install and use than windows. There is a learning curve as with anything but its not as intimidating as it used to be. I hope this helps.

 

[kwired]

Several weeks ago I posted a thread regarding unwanted phone calls and got a lot of good suggestions and advice from many of you. For the past several months I've been getting an exorbitant number of e-mails trying to sell me brain pills, free website designs and, of course, viagra.. How do they know I'm a male :?

Anyone have any quick fixes for these unwanted e-mails? Seems like they come different senders every day.

As mentioned below they have methods of collecting information about you even if it is just based on what sites you browse. I bet you don't get many if any ads that are targeted for females, that is because what information they have collected suggests you probably are male. They change names of the sender every so often to try to get past your junk mail filters.

If you block scripts, cookies, etc. you lose some functionality that may be desired when visiting some web sites. They exploit this area as people want the site to remember who they are or some of their past actions, etc., so they don't have to resubmit information every time they come back.

Also you can switch web browsers to something like firefox. Add extensions that increase privacy and block trackers. Many websites have scripts running in the background that collect information about you, this is mainly done for advertising purposes but can result in lots of unwanted emails. Also make sure there is no adware/viruses on your computer, if your running windows ESET has one of the best products on the market. Or if you want to be even more secure you could install a distro of linux like UBUNTU and forget about viruses, at least for now. You can install UBUNTU alongside windows so you can still run windows when you need it. But for daily tasks such as email or web browsing you can feel much more secure on linux. Many versions of linux are very user friendly and are much easier to install and use than windows. There is a learning curve as with anything but its not as intimidating as it used to be. I hope this helps.