Spam deluge in OE6 (6.00.2900.2180)

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Is anyone else being deluged with spam in Outlook Express? It used to be mostly confined to Hotmail in my experience, but in recent months, my OE inbox has been under assault from bogus stock tipsters, the usual appendage enlargement promises, offers of Rolex copies, employment offers, etc etc.

I always block the senders of this crap, but it makes no difference whatever. Might as well save myself a click and just delete.

Does anyone have any tips for stopping this stream of sheisse? Is there anywhere you can report these turkeys that will effectively stop them, or any way you can really block them?

Cheers

Ross

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I don’t think you will ever stop them being sent, but you can trap them on your PC using one of the Internet Security Suites, like from ZoneAlarm, McAfee or Norton. But you still have to give them at least a cursory glance to check for the rare false positive before deleting the emails you don’t want.

To prevent them even getting to your PC, some ISPs do spam filtering (the service used by the UK cable firm blueyonder seems extremely effective – I haven’t had any since the service started over a year ago), and some people have recommended MailWasher, to keep the spam at your ISP’s mail server without downloading it to your PC. There are others around, as well.

John

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Thanks a lot, John.

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I too have used Mailwasher for quite a while and it has performed well. There is still a filtering process that you must do manually when you review your incoming messages in Mailwasher. But then you can delete the undesirables while retaining the ones you want and then down load just the good stuff to your computer.
Regards,
Slim

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Have a look at thread starting with post 574,342. It won’t resolve your problem but it may give you a few pointers at what you might try. At least you’ll know that you are not alone!
Keith

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In my opinion, blocking the sender will do absolutely no good, and can actually do harm! Spam ‘from’ addresses are usually spoofed, quite often created out of thin air as they’re sent and never used again (hence no possible point blocking them) – and sometimes they’re real addresses picked off of other people’s machines, which means occasionally you’ll find you’ve blocked someone you know or even yourself!

If you decide against the other suggestions made above for blocking the spam before it reaches you (or if it still gets through sometimes anyway), you can set up rules in OE to automatically delete any incoming mail that contains certain words, and phrases that you’ve noticed appear more than once (making them likely to be standard in those types of spam). It took me a while to build up my list of words/phrases (although I’m not using OE any more) but 99.9% of spam is prevented from reaching my inbox now.

Good luck

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Not that I’m trying to pirate this thread but I was going to post something along these lines. My question is more of a curiousity than anything else because I don’t think the spam will ever come to a complete end.

How do these spammers get email through to my account when they don’t even have my correct email address? Twice tonight I’ve had email sent to me that is using a variation of my actual address…how does that get through my ISP account ?

Thanks,
Deb

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Unless you have a “catch-all” address directed to your account, the spammer is in fact using your actual address. However, it might be hidden in a BCC field, which does not appear in the headers of a received message.

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