How to stop spam?

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I just started getting about 10 “return” emails a day. Apparently someone is sending out emails to addresses that are returning to me as undeliverable, but I didn’t’ send them. The IP shows to be coming from Italy, etc.
I of course have done a full virus and spyware scan on my PC and nothing found.

–KZ

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Unfortunately these type emails are difficult to filter out because the offenders keep changing the information just enough that spam filters will not catch them. Perhaps someone has figured a way of doing this, but I think you might be stuck just deleting them.

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OK, thanks

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If EVERYONE, would properly protect their own computers, that crap would soon come to a HALT.

But you have those who are either too stupid or lazy to protect their own PC’s and they get infected
by viruses, trojans, spyware and adware…. and that malware captures the addresses of everyone that
emails that person and sends those addresses away to the spammer that is most likely not even in the USA.
Then the spammer will use those addresses to ‘Spoof’ their emails to make them look like they came from
someone else.

I get a lot of SPAM on my GMail accounts, but GMail has a pretty good SPAM filter and catches most of them.
The ones it misses, I put in by hand by creating a ‘Filter’ for that address.
I’ve been forced to do that with people who refuse to stop sending me movies and long lists of pictures that
over-inflate my download cap.
When something is stopped by GMail, as spam, it never gets downloaded to my computer. Minus crud is cool!

I go to GMail once a week and look at what’s in the spam folder and occasionally I find something that is NOT
spam and I mark it as such and then it’s downloaded to my PC. The rest I delete.
It’s all just a part of playing the Game.

Cheers Mates!

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Good point. This is my work email though and the spam filtering from the web-mail-server is really almost non-existent. I need to look into that further.
Thanks

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One thing that will help is if you create a “junk” email address, and then give out that address when a website requires it. Give out your personal email address only to friends and to legitimate outfits (the bank, your credit card company, etc). That will push most of the spam to your junk email address.

In order to achieve this, you might need to create a new personal (or work) email address. The spam you are currently getting will still go to the old work / personal email address.

Group "L" (Linux Mint)
with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server

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Good reminder. I do that for my personal email, but really can’t do that for work. Customers are going to and should get my email account. I guess someone is having a “little fun”….

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You can’t prevent someone harvesting your email address and then using it to spam people. One of the consequences of the connected world.

cheers, Paul

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You can’t prevent someone harvesting your email address and then using it to spam people. One of the consequences of the connected world.

cheers, Paul

If you start fresh with a new Email address that you then only use for family, friends, and trusted contacts and use a free outlook.com, yahoo, and/or google account for everything else as Mrjim suggested above, you can come pretty close. I have been doing this for years and have very little spam come into my personal Email account. Also, don’t click on remove from spam as it just tells the sender you email address is live and you may just get more spam. clicking on remove from reputable companies is fine. If in doubt, don’t.

Jerry

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I just started getting about 10 “return” emails a day. …

Depending on your setup (any Windows version, a local E-mail client and pop3 E-mail server required) Robin Keir’s K9 anti-spam may help a lot.
NOTE: Do not confuse Robin Keir’s K9 with the K-9 Mail app for the Android operating system.

Gmail + K9 make a formidable anti-spam team.

Also read this thread here:
http://windowssecrets.com/forums/showthread//142525-Junk-e-mail-can-I-retaliate?p=829352&viewfull=1#post829352

_______________________________________________________

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I have had a similar problem from time to time. A partial solution is to use a program like Mailwasher, which comes in a free version (http://www.mailwasher.net) or a paid version (Mailwasher Pro: http://www.firetrust.com/en/products/mailwasher-pro). When you use this program to check your mail in the first instance, you can delete anything that looks like SPAM on your mail server without downloading it to your computer. You can also set up blacklists and whitelists, and bounce offending emails back to the sender (BUT I WOULDN’T RECOMMEND THAT – when you have people receiving spoof emails that seem to come from you, you can easily annoy them even more by this method).
Paul A.

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The only reason to spoof a return email address is if the spammer wants the recipient to recognize the sender, and therefore trust the message. Otherwise, there’s no reason to find and use your email address — the spammer can just make one up. This happened to me recently, and I recognized some of the targeted addresses. Turned out that a spammer in India had hacked into my Yahoo email account (now just a junk account, but I had used it on occasion a couple of years ago), and although there’s no address book, they did harvest about 20 addresses from the 2-year-old “sent mail” list. My guess is that they brute-forced the password (Yahoo allows a million failed logon attempts; they just don’t care), so I upgraded from a 9-character password to 12 characters. (Anyone using Yahoo should do the same.)
It’s also possible that the spammers just made up a random, bogus email address, and happened to hit upon yours, in which case you might be getting this junk for a while. They’ll invent a new one eventually, but if they keep using it, you may find your own email blocked by filters that “recognize” your address as a source of spam.

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For years, I have been using the excellent and totally free SpamBayes, an Outlook add-on, on my personal PCs and all the ones I am in charge of.

Everybody has different criteria for what they consider to be SPAM. SpamBayes quickly learns what YOU consider to be be spam.

Highlight the SPAM mail, click the “Junk Mail” button, and it moves the message to the Junk Mail folder. From there you can delete it or, if you change your mind, you can “Recover” it to your Inbox. There is also a “Junk Suspects” folder for when it isn’t sure.

Every time you tag or retag a message, it learns more. It is just amazing how fast it learns and how accurate it is.

It doesn’t use keywords, white lists or black lists. It uses Bayesian statistical analysis. I neither know, nor care to know, what in the world that is.

No nagging to buy anything, no ads, it just works.

I would not want to be without SpamBayes.

You will thank me.

You’re welcome

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SpamBayes

Has someone taken this on again? When I checked anti-spam solutions a few years ago, SpamBayes had already been abandoned for years. Which means, no updates to cater for more recent spammer tactics.

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

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First thing I would do is change my password in my email account. Should be done regularly anyway. I keep a little notepad by my computer to record them so I don’t forget what I made up. Then – if this is a computer at work – I’d discuss the problem with the person who maintains your system.

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Apparently someone is sending out emails to addresses that are returning to me as undeliverable, but I didn’t’ send them.

This happens to my business addresses [which have been public for over a decade] 3-4 times a year, and each session lasts a few days, never a week. Same happens to others I know. Don’t fret about it, not much useful you can do, and it should pass without consequences.

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

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The native Outlook spam filtering works wonders for me. I have no need at all to use anything else.

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I don’t know how effective this is but every time I get a piece of spam email I forward it to spam@uce.gov and then delete it. I barely get any spam email and when I do get a new one I only get a few and then they are gone.

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This is a business email account, and it sounds like the email service is (at least in part) on the company’s own servers. The server part of the email setup needs either to do its own spam filtering, or else a physical hardware appliance for filtering web traffic needs to be installed. That’s what most businesses do. I don’t run a business system myself, so I can’t offer details.

-- rc primak

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