E Mail address change

I hadn't realised what a problem spam is until I started using NG, now my hotmail address attracts buckets of the stuff. If I mangle my ID will the spammers eventually get fed up and go away, or is that that address on their lists for all eternity?

NHH

Perhaps it is best to start with this:

Rule #1: spammers lie.

Rule #2: If a spammer seems to be telling the truth, see Rule #1.

Rule #3: spammers are stupid.

Rule #4: The natural course of a spamming business is to go bankrupt.

Given that spammers assume that you are really desperate to buy what ever they are pushing, you can be certain that your address is something they consider to be a valuable commodity, there is no way they will ever remove it from their lists, most of the money in the spam scum business is made by selling lists of addresses. They work on the basis of: "If you throw enough s*** at the wall some of it is bound to stick"

You might have noted that the address I use for news groups has as it's first part "allspamreported" Strangely enough the spammers don't seem to believe I mean what I say and at least 30 a day think that it can not apply to them. Some think that they will be safe by removing the spam bit and saying that I signed up for their turdlets. My guess is that the idiots are so stupid that if they were not filling our mail boxes with their garbage they would get their kicks by urinating on electric fences.

Munging your address is an option, but many ISP's / News service providers insist that you use a working address so there is a risk in doing that. It also makes a genuine person who wishes to contact you jump through hoops. Using a throwaway but working address is a neater solution. Once it starts attracting attention from spam scam scum you can block all mail to it and start out again. (If you want one I have plenty of domains and would be happy to set one up for you)

You can greatly reduce the amount of spam you see by using a program such as MailWasher, see:

It allows you to use various block lists and to create your own, even to the extent of blocking whole domains. You can also create filters which can be helpful, but with spam scum coming up with things like P3N1S some garbage will still get through. They are like sewer rats you block one hole and they soon pop up out of another. The program also has a bounce feature which only should by used on the rare occasions where the from address is not forged.

In my case I have seven active email accounts, with all the filters in place I only see about 30 spam/virus messages every 24 hours, it is certain that is only the tip of the iceberg but the filters etc. mean that I am not totally overwhelmed with trash. Such aggressive filtering would be not be a good idea for those who rely for email to earn their living, sadly spam scum have succeeded in making e-mail much less useful than it's users might reasonably expect it to be.

"Richard H Huelin" wrote

Hmm. When I set up the hotmail account it was intended to be a thowaway address as I already had another known to only a few friends which has never had one spam mail. However it has proved rather useful (and I can remember it!) and now carries the vast majority of my email traffic, so I hope it remains useable. There must come a time when the powers that be have to do something about the spammers if the whole network is not to grind to a halt under the weight of this rubbish.

NHH

bankrupt.

thowaway

Certain countries including our own have made attempts to control spam, to a point it can succeed. Not an awful lot of spam is coming directly from within the EEC these days, but with countries like China and Brazil who will sell their souls for a dirty quick buck spam is not about to halt anytime soon. If no one ever bought anything from a spammer the problem would cease.