I’ve got three hotmail accounts. One is old and gets about 25-50 bits of junk mail a day and I use it for nothing at all anymore. One is strickly for one friend, and it gets about three to five bits of junk mail in the inbox even though she’s the only person I’ve ever emailed. Up until recently, my personal one didn’t get any junk mail at all; but starting about a week ago, I get one random email a day that’s anywhere from 100-200k, and it just eats up the space in my mailbox. I’ve only opened two by accident, and in both of them, there’s NOTHING THERE!!!
So far, niether of the computers I’ve used to open these emails have exploded or been gutted electronically, so I doubt they’ve got viruses on them, but I’m just curious…what’s the fucking deal?
I have two hotmail accounts; I rarely use them anymore though I do use ePrompter to tell me first if I have any mail worth saving; you can delete them from ePrompter, which BTW is free.
Most of my junk goes into the well-named Junk Mail folder. A few slip by, but most of them end there.
I only use Hotmail for subscriptions; not for personal mail. My ISP account (I have two) are for personal stuff.
I think the reason Hotmail gets so much spam is that most spammers know everyone has at least one. 
I really believe the spammers have programs that generate names randomly much like the telephone spammers have the programs that generate phone numbers.
If you have a Hotmail account that you use only for a few people, the best thing to do is set up (under options) some filters to move anything but these people into the junk mail folder. Problem then solved.
Hmm…yes…but what I’m really concerned with are these huge files with pretty much nothing in them. What’s the deal with those?
It’s called Klez. It’s a virus that was big a little while ago but seems to have died down. I think you can download protection against it, but I don’t think that just opening the e-mails will cause any problem. Still, if you see a 100k e-mail with a weird subject line- even if it’s from an address that could be someone you know- just delete it.
For more info on the Klez Virus/worm check here.
Yep, Klex. Got a zillion of those friggin e-mails about a month or two back. The ones I had came in two forms. One was “Hey check this cool game I wrote.” The second comes from a fake “postmaster@mailerdaemon…” address, usually from an address I’ve never heard of, much less written to. Hotmail scans them out, that’s why you don’t have it appearing on your screen.
Problem I’ve been having, though, is that I swear I keep on block all messages from “debt-consolidators.com” or something to that effect, yet I keep on getting mail from them. And yes, I’m blocking the domain name. I suppose it’s possible the domain name changes ever-so-slightly, but I’m fairly certain it’s constantly from the same place. Anyone have a problem like that?