"Junk" emails?????

[donna723]

I'm sure I'm not the only one who gets these! I'm talking about the unsolicited garbage emails that are from a different name each time and have a strange tag line on them. I NEVER open these up but catch a glimpse of them as I'm clicking on them to delete them, and the wording is sort of blurry, on a multi-colored background. Some appear to be ads for mail order medicines like Viagra or diet pills, and others seem to be politically oriented. Would anybody ever actually open these and READ them? Or buy any of this stuff? What company would want to advertise in junk emails that people automatically delete without reading?!?

I used to only get these maybe once every other week or so, but I'm getting more and more - up to 8-10 a day now! Is there any way to get rid of them? You can't just block the sender because the names are different each time. I have just about every type of anti virus, adware and spyware programs there is and I still get all this crappola! Are they harmful? Can it load your system up with "boogers" if you just click on it to delete it? Has anybody ever figured out a way to get off their "list"?

:grrr:

 

[HereWeGoAgain]

You'd be surprised how many people respond.

One email spam scam is for a criminal hacker or gang to build a "bot net" by releasing little programs, "bots", to hop from computer to computer on the net. The infected computers are dormant until the master of the net (the hacker who unleashed the bots) activates it, then they pump out spam emails pushing some obscure "penny stock". The master buys up a bunch of the stock the day before, through fronts, then when people respond to the hot tip the price goes up and the scammer sells out at a big profit. The emails have that strange fuzzy look because they are not text files but pictures of text - it's a different format that can't be as readily deciphered as text code.

The effectiveness of the scam depends on some small percentage of people to be gullible enough to buy the stock in the belief that some anonymous emailer would send them a hot tip out of the blue.

A Russian gang was busted last year that had built some huge network, thousands upon thousands of hijacked machines. The actual virus does not do any damage to the host computer, it just uses it to pump out messages to addresses harvested from the owner's email address book. The user never even realizes that anything happened.

Bot net

 

[Marguerite]

husband has installed a really good spam filter that gets 99% of these now. Before that we would get loads, like you. The more sites you register for, or click on, or the more you share your main email address around freely, the more likely
you are to get loads of these spam. We use several email addresses for different purposes, and avoid using our extremely personal email address for public use.

With the ads for various potency pills, or ads to make a man's appendage larger, husband would play a game - he would add up all the inches (and other statistics) the 'treatments' offered, then come and tell me, "If I'd answered all these ads, mine would now be four and a half feet long!" I think his record was seven feet - I told him that if it grew that big he could masquerade as a petrol pump at the garage. Just throw the darn thing over his arm...

Marg

PS Marg's Man here...
She makes me look cleverer than I am.
There's two ways we defeat Spam. I've HAD to get good at it because I get about 100-200 per day to my work address. (I just checked, it's six hours since the last check and I have 32 new spam out of 57 messages)
First is through our email client (the programme you receive your email with). We use Eudora which has a feature that detects possible junk mail. This feature can be 'educated' about what you consider to be junk; after about five hundred messages it has a pretty good handle on what you want to actually get. It's available for Macintosh and Windows and is soon going to go Public Domain (ie free to download)
Second is not my doing (although I'd like to take the credit) Our ISP's - we use two - both have a spam filtering service as part of their package.
In both cases the spam is not actually deleted automatically but flagged in some way (Eudora actually puts it in a special mailbox) so that you can deal with it at your leisure. You can change the settings so that you never see it but this is not a good idea because something important may be deleted unseen.

Marg has also given you the same advice I gave her years ago. It works. My work takes me to the dark side of the web so my work address is exposed to bots, etc. Even so I can keep it down to 'only' 1-200.

 

[Stella Johnson]

You can also try changing your security options in your email.
Most programs allow you to put certain words in that you always want blocked that are in the subject line... like viagra etc.

Steph

 

[donna723]

Steph,

The specific words like "Viagra" or "Stocks" are never in the subject lines. The subject lines are usually just a goofy collection of words - half the time they don't even make sense. And the "Sender" is a different name every time, like names out of a phone book, so you can't just block the Sender. I guess that's how they get through.

:grrr: