Spam Rant !!

[macroy]

Originally Posted by Lindsey_Mcfarren

I have forwarded contact information they have sent me to the CIA office that deals with this topic.

Except they don't deal with these type of things. CIA isn't law enforcement. Not to mention most of these scams cross jurisdictions.. making it very tough to investigate.

Back to your issue - JBrown has it right.. the more you respond, the more spam you will get. Aside from the 419 scams, most spam messages are automated trying to get you to click on a link or what not.... and some are simply trying to validate your address... so by responding, you only confirm that you are in fact a "live" address. Which is then added to the list and sold to other spammers.

Also the more you give out your address (i.e. to onine shopping sites, listservs, groups etc), the more exposed it gets. Many of those places sell your info. The best way to "minimize" spam is to have secondary accounts.... and this is a good way to see for yourself. i.e. I have multiple gmail accounts... and the ones I use for registrations to generic sites are the ones that have the most spam. The two that I use for personal communication have very little....(but they're still there)... and google actually has pretty good spam filter (best in my opinion among the free web based services).

Finally, for sites that want you to register for something you will only need once... try sites like bugmenot.com ... they provide bogus accounts for those occaisions.

[Lindsey_Mcfarren]

Originally Posted by macroy

Except they don't deal with these type of things. CIA isn't law enforcement. Not to mention most of these scams cross jurisdictions.. making it very tough to investigate.

Actually at the time I reported it, I did so after watching a special, it gave the specific name of the department with the CIA set up to handle these issues. Remember the FBI is designed to deal with domestic things, the CIA things abroad. I spoke with someone at the Tampa office and they gave me a fax number to which I faxed printed out emails.

[Radek]

Another important thing, is that when you GET junk e-mail... make sure that you mark it as junk, the more information the spam filters get... the better they are at serving you.

When I first started using gmail to get e-mail from my 3 other accounts, all from private domains... I had like 25 spam a day. After a few months, its dwindled down to 1 spam, and a handful of newsletters from sites that I purchased things from and I like to be informed of the deals.

However, the address I want to use, I don't think will ever recover. It gets a good 500 spam a day, because somehow that entire domain's e-mail directory was publicly listed somewhere (I think this got fixed)... and a spider managed to get a hold of it.

Also, if you're on anything publicly accessible... make sure to take some simple steps to disguise your address from webcrawlers that look for more addresses to spam.

putting thisisme(@t)yahoo!!!, etc works to keep the bots from being able to actually send you spam

[Arf Arf]

My e-mail is through Comcast and they have a very effective spam filter. I get maybe one a week.