Junk emails

[Clive Noble]

I recently opened a Hotmail account, useful when I go travelling.
The address is only known by my kids and one colleague from work

Today, I sent myself an email to see if it worked and was surprised to see that in a short period of time I had received 93 emails

Out of this lot there were only two genuine letters, my own and a sincere greeting from MSN welcoming me to their happy family of emailers.

The rest were split up as follows and were not all from the same source:

Reduce your tax bill 9

Consolidate payments 36

Mortgage offers 8

Lose inches (around the waist) 3

Add 1 to 3 inches (below the waist!) 19

Attract the opposite sex
(inches not mentioned) 2

Get University Diploma 5

Car Purchase Plan 1

Free DVD offers 2

Advice for married couples 1

Re: Your Inquiry 1

My Mistake... Sorry 1

You have received a greetings card 1

Change the color of your... 1

Internet Phone Technology 1


This is the sort of junk I'm getting on my regular email too, but I expect that after holding and displaying my email address for 8 years.

So I can only assume that MSN are selling off lists of addresses.

I'm not really concerned with this Hotmail problem, but does anyone have any advice how to filter junk from the Netscape email browser?

One last horrifying thought, if 19 guys are offering me an extra inch, will I need to push a wheelbarrow in front of me?

[10 Pence Short]

Clive,

I have two Hotmail accounts both used an equal amount. The account that makes up part of my name receives more than double the junk my alias one does.

Unfortunately my junk isn't as varied as yours- it's only ever about one thing (I think you can guess what).

The easiest way is to use Hotmails Junk filter on the maximum security setting. I've found all the mails I actually want get through and the rest are put into a Junk folder for you to view and bin.

I reckon it's quite likely the junk senders have software that generates names to go before @Hotmail.com and then sends out emails by the thousand, obviously expecting a number of them to come back undelivered from non existant addresses.

Unless you ticked the boxes on signup then I don't believe Microsoft would sell your address on a mailing list.

[chip anderson]

He has not installed it for me yet, but my guru tells me you can install software and filters that will cut this all out. The one I want: If you ain't on my list, you don't get through.

You're lucky that you aren't getting the porn add too.

Chip

[Steve Machol]

Clive Noble said:
So I can only assume that MSN are selling off lists of addresses.

The shock! The horror! Would Micro$oft actually do such a dastardly deed?

:bbg:

[10 Pence Short]

Did I detect some sarcasm in there somewhere?

Well done, give yourself a gold star!;)

One of my favorite replies is from the head of General Motors (think it was Bob Lutz) after Bill 'Show me the cheap glasses' Gates had claiimed that if cars developed as fast as computers all cars would be flying in the air by now. To which he replied- if our cars crashed as often as his computers we'd all be dead anyway!