I have gotten 4 of these messages in the past two days all from different people but all from msn.com. I haven’t gone to the site cause I’m afraid they’ll put some trash on my computer.
So has anyone else gotten this and how do I stop getting these? I **d out the web-link so no one goes there by accident, but left in the trailing stuff in case it gives someone a clue about what’s up with this site. By the way the random
goofy spacing is in every one of these stupid e-mails
Hello,
I get about a dozen of those a day.
WAG: I believe there was some sort of anti-spam legislation passed recently, which is pointless, obviously and does nobody any good at all, since we all get as much spam as ever. I believe the weird spacing and punctuation conventions are to throw off spam filters the ISPs use. Most spam filters, if not all, (I have no idea) tend to scan e-mails for certain key words, such as “Viagra” or “mortgage.” By inserting a space or a comma in a weird place, the same word does not trigger the spam filter.
As for getting rid of them, my understanding is that there really isn’t a way. If you click on “unsubscribe,” you’ve just told the spammer that he/she has hit a valid e-mail address and you’ve just opened Pandora’s Spam Box. There may be good spam filters we can download or buy, but I have little confidence they’ll do any good. I’d guess you’d have to enter every single space and punctuation combination for every key word before they’d really work… and who has time for that?
Perhaps someone a tad more computer-savvy will come along and offer better solutions or explanations. Until then, just do what I do and delete. Certain ISPs will allow you to click on a “report as spam” button, which makes me feel better until I stop to realize there’s no way anyone at my (huge, corporate conglomerate but NOT AOL) ISP could do anything about the massive volume of spam reported to them daily.
::shrugs::
Just ignore it and delete without opening.
P.S. For what it’s worth, I’ve been getting lots of e-mails that say, “Hi I’m Jenny and someone told me we should hang out. Go to my web site, where I don’t like to wear a lot of clothes. It’s FREE!” :rolleyes:
You can’t get out of receiving them. All you can do is tell your elected politicians that current anti-spam legislation is an ineffective, pointless, sad and pathetic joke.
What ever you do, don’t click on the links. There’s no knowing what rubbish/spyware/viruses await your browser at the other end. The id part of the link may well also identify you uniquely, meaning you’ll be marked out for even more similar emails.
Well, actually you could set up your email spam filters to auto-forward all your spam to your legislators’ email addresses along with a brief blurb about the effectiveness of their anti-spam laws so far. I’ve been considering that
If you use Outlook or Outlook Express, I recommend SpamBayes
http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/
You’ll still get the damn emails but they’ll be filtered off into their own folder. It’s not perfect, but pretty friggin’ good.
And it’s free.
Is there something in the Patriot Act where your legislators might feel threatened by your forwarding such emails and have you detained? While I ask this partly in jest, is this poosible?
Oh yeah, I got that spam, “for a good time URL 86.75.30.9”