A few months ago I made the mistake of ordering drugs from bestrxonlinepharmacy and have been inundated with junk email ever since. The annoying thing is that they come from a different sender every time, so blocking the sender is not effective. Does anyone know if there is a way to block these emails?
I called the company’s 800# a few weeks ago and they said they would take me off the list, but I’m still getting them. It also appears they sold my email address because I’m also getting emails from other online pharmacies offering to help me increase my manhood and other such things (I’m female). Anyone have a solution, other than the delete button ?
***Apologies if this has been asked and answered before. I did a search and found nothing. Thanks in advance for any replies.
Apart from spam filtering suggestions, which you will probably get, in the future I would suggest doing online business through a temporary or throwaway mail address that becomes invalid automatically or can be deactivated after a time interval. I have a forwarding service that allows three aliases. I change one of them every couple of months, and use it specifically for online purchases, and other “one shot” transactions. Tiger direct is currently being annoying. Since my order has been serviced, I will soon change the alias, and all their spam will bounce. There are services which allow you to generate temporary mail aliases, but I find that just changing my “I don’t want you to have my permanent email” alias periodically really reduces the junk.
When you called the 1800 number, you went on the list of ‘verified email addresses that will receive any junk we send them’. Look into your email client and see if it has filters that can weed out some of it. Most email clients will not block anything from people in your address book so you may, for example, filter out anything that has the word “dick” but still receive email from your friends named Dick.
To my knowledge, there’s none apart using a spam filter or ditching this e-mail address. And the problem will only get worse with time, to the point you’ll be receiving 50 such spams each day. Spammers indeed sell the addresses of their victims to each other. Once your address ends up on any spammer’s list, you’re toast.
I hadn’t ordered anything or given out email addresses for anything. I was receiving a lot of drug sales emails. It’s almost stopped. I used my providers blocking service. I click block sender and block the senders provider. It was from Bolivia or other South American country I would never get email from. I then marked each one as spam and this forwards the message to the providers staff. The IT staff deals with the Bolivian problem site. It was always a new user, but the email was always a certain provider. Letting the provider know that a certain domain is sending lots of this type of email helps everybody.
Download and install a spam proxy with a Bayesian filter. I use SpamPal with the Bayesian filter plugin. It sits between your TCPIP stack and your E-Mail client to read and filter mail before it gets to you, and it does so by allowing you to teach it what is spam and what isn’t. It uses a combination of prefab whitelists and blacklists (that are extensible by you) as well as a heuristically-analyzed list of weighted keywords that are typically used in spam E-Mails, also extensible by you when you train the filter by going through your most recently received E-Mail and flagging which ones are good and which ones are spam.
It can take a while to train the filter well enough that it can tell the difference almost 100% of the time. It took me three or four months before I could be pretty confident that it knew the difference.
Note that it does not delete spam; it still sends it to your E-Mail client, but it will flag it with whatever tag (like “** SPAM **”) in the subject header field so you can further set up your E-Mail client to filter tagged items as you like.
I’ve been using it for a few years now and it is incredibly effective.
The best non-technical approach is to switch to Gmail and let them handle the filtering. Gmail’s spam filtering is second to none. Gmail can be configured to retrieve e-mail from one or more other accounts to help you during the transition period.
Another very simple trick you can do, if your service supports it (gmail does) is to add suffixes to your email address. So for example, if I was joeblow@gmail.com and ordered something from bestrxonlinepharmacy.com, I’d give them the email address joeblow+bestrxonlinepharmacy@gmail.com (on gmail, the “+” and everything after it is ignored). I do this pretty religiously, and it helps in two ways: 1) I can tell who sold my address to a mailing list and complain to them or stop doing business with them, and 2) I can make a filter for mail sent to a particular address to just automatically junk it.
Side question- why does spam run in odd waves? For a long time, my spam trap had 12 or so items per day. Then for the last few months, nearly nothing. Then, back to a dozen or so.
AFAIK that question is analogous to asking why the SDMB has more posts some days than others. It just depends on what all the people sending the spam are up to. There are no technical reasons that I know of that would delay or accelerate batches of e-mail. Generally mail servers try to relay/deliver mail ASAP.
Blocking the sender’s provider would be a good plan, but I don’t see that option on my Outlook list. It has 'Block Sender" or “Add Sender’s Domain to Safe list”…but there must be a way, I’ll keep looking.
Thanks everyone, for all the replies. From here on, I’ll use another account when ordering anything. Lesson learned.
Yes I did, and I had every intention of reordering from them…until I started getting all the junk mail. Now I will NEVER order from them again out of principle. That’s what strikes me as weird about this marketing practice. Do they really think this barrage of annoying emails is going to motivate me to place an order with them? I can’t believe this tactic would be effective with anyone.
Wow, learn something new every day. I hate the idea of using multiple email accounts so I’ll definitely do this in the future. I use gmail too. Thanks!