How the fuck does spam STILL get in my Hotmail inbox when filters are set exclusive?

The BBQ Pit
1

I suffer ~50 pieces of spam a day in my Hotmail account, which is why I don’t use it any more, I just maintain it.

After gradually setting the filters higher and higher, with the problem still getting worse, I now have them set to “exclusive.” This mean that ONLY people in my address book can send me mail.

So how come some spanish-language-CD fuck (no slur on Spain but I don’t have any Spanish correspondents, nor do I speak spanish - or is this portuguese in fact?) STILL manages to get into my inbox rather than junk mail?

tusrebotees@yahoo.com for the record.

Is Hotmail letting this spammer in deliberately? Could a spammer pay Hotmail a huge amount of cash to be allowed to override a user’s inbox filters?

2

If it’s any consolation, I have the same exact problem.

3

FUCK HOTMAIL

I have the exact same problem that you do. I don’t use the account anymore because it gets so much crap, that it becomes a chore to wade through it all just for the occasional missive from some friend who I haven’t heard from in a few years. The only reason I have it is I’ve had it for years and every so often someone pops out of the woodwork.

A friend of mine set up an account for his parents who were going on vacation. His parents never used it, but when my friend checked the account for them, it was full of porn spam. WTF. I think those fuckers sell our email addresses to just about anybody.

I have a yahoo account that gets no spam even though it is the one that I give whenever I register on a MB or any site for that matter.

4

Gee, what a shame spambots will pick up the email address of tusrebotees@yahoo.com ! I am sure tusrebotees@yahoo.com would like to get lots of email about penis enlargers and flea-bitten whores. tusrebotees@yahoo.com probably gets off on that stuff. tusrebotees@yahoo.com tusrebotees@yahoo.com tusrebotees@yahoo.com tusrebotees@yahoo.com tusrebotees@yahoo.com tusrebotees@yahoo.com tusrebotees@yahoo.com tusrebotees@yahoo.com tusrebotees@yahoo.com tusrebotees@yahoo.com

5

Someone once tried to argue with me that you only get porn spam in your hotmail If you go to porn pages. I disagree though. Does anyone know the answer to this? I can’t figure that it’s correct because how would going to a porn site and simply viewing it allow them access to your webmail address?

6

Nope, definitely not. I get a ton of porn spam on my work account, and occasionally get it on my regular one, but I don’t visit porn sites. And if I did, I certainly wouldn’t do it from my work computer.

7

Nope, you don’t have to visit.

My work account, thankfully, gets absolutely no spam. I don’t use my work address for anything not related for work, and I do not give out my business card to all the free lunch drawings.

Shortly after September 11, however, I set up a Yahoo! account specifically to handle work (at the time, our email wasn’t web-based, and my laptop was stuck in one of the closed off buildings). Almost immediately, I started getting a trickle of spam - not the amount my personal email accounts get, but enough to be annoying. My Hotmail account gets the most, although I haven’t had istara’s problem, and it is all junk. My ISP email, which I don’t use much either, doesn’t get much spam, but does get some.

So no, you don’t have to visit a site to get the annoying porn spam.

8

Do Hotmail really sell email addresses? I don’t think so.

Ok, anyone who has ever tried to sign up for a Hotmail account knows that pretty much every word is taken. So bob @ hotmail is gone, bobby @ hotmail, bobman @ hotmail, etc. To get an email address, you need to go with an obscure combination of words, or a combination of words and numbers or letters and numbers. Even then, bob1953 @ hotmail is probably gone, so is bsmith53 @ hotmail etc. Well, the porn spammers know this too. Keeping in mind that they don’t care if the email doesn’t get through because they’re unlikely to be providing a real return address, they can just set their email program to try all possible combinations containing words and names, and a few numbers, and probably have a huge success rate. If you want to test this theory for youself, sign up for two Hotmail accounts. Make one as simple as possible and one much more complex (like b1j9smith53xj72 @ hotmail), don’t ever use them to send or receive email and see how long it takes the spam to come rolling in. If the theory that Hotmail sells the addresses is correct, both should start getting the same amount of spam in the same amount of time. If the spammers are just trying every possible combination of letters and numbers, a long complex sequence like b1j9smith53xj72 should never come up, and it should never get spam.

Also, I signed up for a Hotmail account using my first name, my last name and my birth year, and got a lot of spam, but also got emails for another girl of my name. She’d had the account and lost it - either because she didn’t check it for 60 days, or because she asked for it to be deleted, or something like that - and so it was available when I applied for it, but it had been used in the past, and so it was still getting spam from it’s previous use. If she had used it while signing people’s guestbooks or on newsgroups, it would have ended up on the spammers list, and they would have kept on emailing it after it was deleted because they don’t get the bounce messages.

So, the original question, why do they still get spam through despite the exclusive filter? I have no idea. I really cannot explain that one. If the email was being sent with your own address as the return address, I guess it would make sense, but it’s not. Perhaps there is some corruption at Hotmail, but I’m thinking it’s more likely to be corrupt individuals and not the company policy - after all, Hotmail are the ones storing all this spam, which must cost them a fortune. I can’t see spam being so lucrative that it’s worth the massive storage space needed. If Hotmail could totally eliminate spam, wouldn’t their bandwidth and storage needs drop dramatically, saving them big dollars?

9

Same here; I have custom filters set which SHOULD direct emails with certain words in the subject line to my trashcan. For reasons I’ve yet to fathom, when they work at all, they divert them to my junkmail folder, which means that 90% of the time my hotmail account is over its size limit.

10

I have two Hotmail accounts. One I use as my contact info for web purchases, and the other I use to write to only a few people. The first one gets bombarded with spam, but is still manageble. The second one I’ve never let see the light of day in the public eye, and I’ve never received a single piece of spam in over a year of having the account.

11

There has to be something bizarre about Hotmail. My company went through a server migration a few weeks ago, during which we would have no access to our regular email from Friday to Sunday. I needed to do some business with a vendor, so I went to Hotmail to sign up for a free account I could use that Friday. To my surprise, my corporate email name was available as a Hotmail name, so I used it. During the signup sequence, I made sure to deselect all of the “send me promotions” and “include me in the directory” and everything; this was to be a temporary account only.

The first spam came in forty-five minutes later.

What the hell? I thought. That’s bizarre. The only thing I’ve sent was the one message to the vendor, and now that I’m checking for their reply an hour later, the only thing I’ve received is an offer for “U.N.I.V.E.R.S.I.T.Y. D.I.P.L.O.M.A.S.” about fifteen minutes ago.

By the end of the day, I had a dozen unsolicited messages. And now, a few weeks later, they come in at the rate of thirty to fifty a day. (I’m continuing to maintain the account on the off chance we lose email again, even though I haven’t used it since the first day.) I’ve never used this address to sign up for anything, and I’ve only sent the one message.

It’s evil, I tell you. Evil. That’s the only explanation.