Cleaning Up Email

[Anonymous]

I’m wondering if anyone who knows a lot about computers can give some advice (maybe Ken?).

I, evidently, gave my email address to someone or something and am constantly getting junk emails. I know that everyone gets a few now and then, but I get about 150 per day. Is it possible to fix this or would I have to vacate that email address and create a new one?

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[Anonymous]

You can block any email address by using the preference settings in your ISP account.

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[Ken]

The above is true only if you use an isp type interface for email. I have been rebuilding mail servers all week here. I pulled my servers from the Westin since they had not been rebuilt in 5 years.

If you can tell me what your using to retrieve email (outlook, webmail, google or hotmail) I might be able to tell you what to do.

Understand a few things though. Giving out your email is not required to get hammered with spam anymore.

Depending on how your mail is served, your email address can be hit with spam from a wide variety of methods that have nothing to do with you giving it out or publishing it.

I you send me an email I can read the headers and tell how your email is being sent.

Ken at ken-davis.net

or you can post here what you know of where your mail comes from.

Quick and dirty fix for a serious level of spam like mine, (400-600 per day) is forward the address to a gmail account and let google remove the spam.

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[Anonymous]

THANK YOU, KEN! I’m going to send an email to you right now, seems like that would be easiest from what you said.

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[Anonymous]

Ken – I did send you an email, so let me know if you never got it.

I have been doing what lattemom suggested and just putting all of the email addresses in my “blocked” section. However, I was under the impression that you shouldn’t open these mysterious emails, but since I have to open them to actually get the address, that is what I’m doing right now.

My husband uses the same email provider and he doesn’t get all these weird emails (I can’t count how many people want to send me millions of dollars).

Anyways, any help with this is greatly appreciated!

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[Ken]

I am researching yahoo now since I have never used it. From what I read it is designed to look a lot like outlook.

I don’t use that either :)

I can see you use yahoo mail via the web mail interface.

All spam filters have uneven response rates since the spammers continue to vary the methods of hiding their origin and the filter companies have to respond.

Let me look into it a bit more.

Unless it has changed from the info in the forums, it looks like forwarding the mail to a better spamfilter location results in a fee.

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[Anonymous]

Ken – I can’t thank you enough for looking into this for me! Anything you come up with will be great!

Lattemom – Thank you for the advice earlier because I think it’s working. Each time I get a new junk email, I put the address into my “blocked” section and I think I’m receiving less and less!

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[JoB]

i use spam blocker in outlook… and it does work… it catches most of the spam.

but.. and here is the big problem.. you really have to sort through what it blocks for a very long time because i found too many important messages in there.

that said.. it took me less than an hour to sort through the 400+ messages that were put in my spam filter…. and another 2 hours to go through the remaining 400+ messages.. some of which were spam.

so.. it sved me half the time.

i use outlook because it is easy ken… i know it’s not the best… but on a bad brain day i can still use it:(

my hubby has had his email filtered through google gmail for some time now and loves it… so i am probably going to follow soon.

i am a very slow adopter:)

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[Anonymous]

Ken (or anyone else that has had this problem and may have a remedy) – All these junk emails that I am receiving, I’ve noticed, are not sent to me. In the “To” line, it is not my name or email address. How could this be happening?

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[Sue]

NewResident, just a suggestion going forward. I actually have 3 different email addresses. I’ve got the regular one I give to friends/relatives for daily stuff. Then I have the more “formal” sounding name for resumes, and things where I don’t want to be embarrassed by my email address. :) And finally I have a third one which is my “disposable” email – it’s one that I use to register at websites, ones that I’ll post publicly (like one time when I wanted to post it in a blog comment for someone to contact me) – that address I could care less how much spam it may get.

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[Anonymous]

Sue – Thanks. That’s a really good idea. Maybe it’s time to create a new email address.

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[Anonymous]

I have 1 email address and so does my husband, we use the same connection to the Internet, he has a laptop I have a desktop they are in the same house. I get 1 set of emails on my desktop and another totally different set of emails on his laptop. I have called Comcast to come investigate it and each ime the tech can not find a solution as he has never seen this before. So I receive massive amounts of emails, at one accoount but on 2 computers.

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[JoB]

lattemom… have you considered networking your computers so you could share the email?

or use a google account so you have them available in one place…

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[Anonymous]

We share the same router and we are set up for home networking through Comcast already but I still receive 2 sets of email. My husband just receivs 1 set on both computers so I have to check both computers all the time.

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[Ken]

RE the to address not matching.

The specifics of how an email is routed to you are always in the header. On some email readers it is either difficult or nearly impossible to easily read the original text with the header info.

On some you can look for a button or menu choice for “show all headers” or “show original” which will open up the message and convert the html to text (with codes) and usually show the header information.

Most modern email clients will strip out the original header info when forwarding a suspect email to some one else for analysis, but you could try sending me one of them to check.

Here are some links to explanations that may help you understand what you are seeing if you can get a look at the headers. Some may also have outdated info on other topics related to their local mail system or historical anti spam tactics that are now obsolete, so use them for education in a general way.

http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Email-Spoofing.html

http://www.colorado.edu/CNS/email/headers.html

http://copland.udel.edu/~sbunting/invtips.htm

http://www.rickconner.net/spamweb/notmyaddress.html

http://www.rickconner.net/spamweb/index.html

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The comcast issue can probably be easily traced but most of the comcast people I have ever talked to have no idea how any mailserver works ,let alone theirs. Most will deny that their outgoing servers use “Pop before SMTP” as an anti spam strategy even though telneting to their mail servers and testing it will show it unequivocally.

I never used a comcast email address when I had their service, (even though they gave me one or more) since I have my own mail servers, but if I remember correctly that had a way to assign multiple usernames to one actual email address.

Also if you are both using the same email address with a client set to use POP mail (which downloads the mail to your computer) with out the setting on one of them to “leave mail on server” then which ever machine checks the mail first in each cycle, will download all the incoming mail up to that point. This is useful for road warriors who wish to read their incoming mail while on the road and yet preserve it so it can be downloaded to their home or office computer for archiving. It is also possible to have one computer checking mail for two addresses while another only checks one address.

It is also possible to create this situation on an IMAP server-client but it takes several wrong settings on both sides If I remember correctly.

I am still working on my server rebuild /redesign project at the moment but I will check back in here later.

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