Spam...Heeeellllllpp!!!

Imagine

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I'm sick and tired of all the spamming going on, and to wake up to 30-50 penis emails every morning is enough to make me puke, not to mention the hundreds I get on a daily basis, ebay, viagra, insurance, people who know me, but I've never met them! The unsubcribe never works. What the hell can I do to get rid of them?

Is there a solution? Can I buy a spam stopper?

Your help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

PS I'm using Entourage.
 
I set up my rules to black all that, and if it matches any of those and or is junk mail, not only will it move it to my Junk Mail folder, but i will not receive a New Mail sound or bouncing/ flashing icon. I also swicthed my email server to a new system that used spam assassin, but the weird thing, seems as if i get almost no mail these days... I don't feel important and i wonder what if any I want is being blocked. I went from a ton a day to less than a dozen.
 
Never hit the unsubscribe. It will only tell the spammers that there is a live body at the other end of their tunnel.

I use eudora 6 and the junk mail filter works really well. It rates every mail you get for spam content on a scale of 1 to 100. You can set it from supersensitive to obtusely ignorant and it will catch your spam. I have it set to 55 and about 2% of the mail that gets through is still spam, but I can live with that since I don't want to troll through the junk folder to make sure nothing real got canned.

You may want to change your address as Urb says, and then NEVER hit the unsubscribe.
 
Get rid of those yahoo, msn and Co. free mail-accounts. Such spamming tools are mostly made for those accounts. Get your own domain and make sure to not share it with anyone but friends...
 
.. use the hotmail etc account for spam thigns like registerings for sites etc.
never give the real personal address to unknown things.

make rules in mail.

if you are not in to: field > junk (follow this a while to see if real mail gets to junk with it, shouldnt)
it in the message there are things like
unsubscribe
penis
enlarge
viagra
insurance
> move to junk.

those should help with a big percentage of them.
 
Mail also has a bounce back feature. A few will come back as not able to deliver, but it will slow down if not stop those pesky things.
 
Click once on the suspected email, go to the Message Menu and select Bounce to sender. This will send the email back with a message that the email address is invalid. Hence the sender thinks your email address is no good.

Most spammers send to a variety of email addresses that have a slightly different variation in a random order. Like john@, john1@, jon1@, etc.
 
They're also using invalid sender addresses, so bouncing back messages will only send the spam to even MORE people.
 
I recommend you sign up for a mail account at Mail.com, which is what I currently use. Yes, it's a free account, but Mail.com has excellent spam filters on their side, and you can set up your own filters as well. For only a few dollars per month, you can upgrade to use POP3 (which is what you use to download your mail to something like Entourage or Mail.app) and bounce the rest from a mail program.
 
I've been known to only allow people in my Address Book, everyone else gets rejected!
If I'm expecting mail from sites, I make a filter to accept that.
If other people are really trying to get through, I have them send a keyword in the subject - this is filtered for me to review and add to my address book.

Also sites that use SpamAssasin are great. If you're lucky, you can play with your own custom filters (depends on the site, does not matter if they use it - you might still not be able to).
 
I can't do anything with spam assasin, well not that i am aware of, I rarely login to my server to check the email, I just use Entourage. So I'll look into that and see if i can tweak anything. But it is stopping damn near everything, and what looks suspicious, gets marked by "***SPAM***" which i filter to the Junk Mail folder.
 
I have my mail forwarded to hotmail which allows me to set up the High spam filter setting and I then have a safe list of emails that get through. Somehow it knows that even emails from people not on my list (but not spam) get through. This also means I get a spam every once in a while, but I haven't had to see a "penis spam" for over a year. It feels great! :)

Never, EVER answer spam back and don't freak out. It's always going to happen so just take the power back and hit the delete key when you get it.
 
SpamSieve works great with Entourage and also works with Mail, but I have found Mail's junk filter to work pretty well.

You can get a 30 day trial of it and buy it for 30 bucks or something, but it's worth the money and is really accurate after it has been trained.
 
You can also just get a new email account through your internet service provider. Along with that, start using a different mail program. I use Mozilla (http://www.mozilla.org/) because I can turn-off images in the email program. Some spammers randomly send out emails that request images from a server. Once your email address is VERIFIED from the image request, MORE spam is sent to that address. The Mozilla Mail program suppresses email from sending out the request, so once you have it, it's "locked" into the mail program where it came be safely deleted without sending for the requested image(s). Another feature I like about Mozilla is that it can "remember" that certain webpages I go to like to set cookies or place picture advertisements somewhere in the page. Mozilla can be configured to reject cookies and images not orginating from the source server. You can also turn-off animated GIF cycling for those "flashing" and annoying advertisements.

If you don't want to use Mozilla, use Apple's Mail program, or get an online email account, like Yahoo Mail.

Seriously give Mozilla a try, if you need help setting it up, just ask.
 
I wondered about those mails. If I don't access them, do they still send for the images? I think they don't because if I do take a peek after a day or two they are still blank.

If they get trashed right away, they can't phone home anyway.

Not to doubt the effectiveness of mozilla, I was just wondering
 
You can disable the pictures in Mail.app, too, btw. Most mail apps can, afaik.
 
In Entourage i partially receive emails up to 20k, that way only text comes through and very small images, like a companies logo. And if i know who is sending the email, i will retrieve the complete email.

Great way to cut down on bandwidth of emails, because if you get a large one and you weren't expecting it, it slows down the retrieval of mail.
 
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