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On Wed, 6 Feb 2013, Neil Winchurst wrote:
Until very recently I almost never saw any scam emails on my accounts. (I am not referring to viruses and other nasties here.) However, in the last two or three months or so I seem to be getting a lot of rubbish sent to me.They seem to come in different groups. I have had some from 'ladies' with Russian sounding names who want to be my friend. I have had some which offer to improve my presence on the web. Others are offers of ways to make money easily and quickly. And I need hardly mention the ones that can improve my love life with various medical nostrums.[1]Is it just me or is this stuff really increasing recently? I used to get such items very rarely, perhaps two or three times a year. (That is not a typo, they were that rare.) Now I get some most days.I would be interested to hear what others on the list think,
It comes in waves, and a lot will depend on who you email and how they (the spammers) get your email address. If it's on a website somewhere, then you'll get SPAM. If it's held in someones address book (which happens automatically by default IIRC with people using Outlook and some other Email programs), and their PC gets compromised, then the address book gets sent to the spammers. Yahoo, AOL, etc. accounts are regualarly broken by e.g. using no encryption to connect to them (public wifi), or by using a compromised PC with keylogger software running. Spammers have automated tools to abuse Yahoo, AOL, etc. accounts to send spam.
And sometimes it's not so automated - I've seen spam on my wordpress sites that could only have been sent by a human - some miserable sod somewhere getting 1p per email/message sent, who replied to one of the "work from home by email" adverts out there... I've even had spammers register a valid (but temporary!) email address to mailing lists then spam the list - and that's required a lot of human intervention...
Some online retailers will sell-on your email address, so check the tick-boxes, but some (RS, Farnell, I'm looking at you right now) will send you spam regardless.
Of-course if you view the email in a web friendly email program, then just viewing it will often trigger the loading of an innocent looking graphic and at that point, the sender immediately knows your email address is valid and can therefore sell it on at a higher rate. You are nothing more than a commidity to them.
I currently get emails from NatWest saying they can't validate my email because I read their emails in a plain-text email program that doesn't fetch the URLs so they never know when I've read their email...
You just need a good spam checker to go with your email, or have your provider do it for you.
I've had the same email address since about 1995 and never really bothered about trying to hide it - as a result I often get over 1000 spam emails sent to me a day, although it's becoming less these days, but I have the tools to deal with it, so it's not big deal. Just annoying.
Your best bet is to identify the spam by simply looking at the subject and sender /before/ opening the email and deleting them there and then.
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq