Starting a few days ago the amount of e-mail spam I get per day has trippled. And what’s more, At least one of them (daily) contains a virus.
On the plus side I can spot the virus e-mails a mile away. On the minus side My computer may soon have to lose it’s anti-virus software virginity. I check my e-mail at work where the anti-virus measures ‘catch’ the viruses.
But at home I am hoping that by recognising them, and keeping the preview pane off, and ‘permanently’ deleting them. I am relatively safe.
Why must there be fucktards?
I am sorry to have to say this but : duh.
One must have an e-mail address that they can give out (I have addresses, one doesn’t get any spam. Just the occasional manx network announcement and a few amazon e-mails)
Despite keeping my email private, I discovered only weeks after gettign a new email address that I was a popular spam and virus recipient. Why is that? Apparently, my username is not long enough, now that I have a “charter.net” address. I’m told the spammers just blanket major providers like Charter with all kinds of random letter combinations of usernames. :mad:
Oh, if only it was possible to get anything faster than dial-up from my local trusty ISP that served me well for 10 years. No random spam to that address.
I finally beat the spammers by creating a “Mail” folder in Outlook and then setting a rule: If the sender’s name IS in my address book, then the e-mail gets moved to the “Mail” folder. All the chaff tays in the default inbox where the senders are quickly perused (in case a buddy is sending me an e-mail for the first time) and deleted. Not an elegant solution, but it beats sorting through 40-50 e-mails and risking missing a ‘wanted’ message.
I’ve been lucky and have not yet been infected and also do not run an antivirus software. I was concerned and asked Dopers for help.
I’ve heard that not forwarding chain letters and such helps, but I am not sure I believe it. Seems like once someone sends your e-mail address along with everyone else in their address book you are screwed and vulnerable to the psycho who gets the chain.
Matchka. I do that too, but I still have to sit there while 90 odd e-mails plop into my inbox one by tedius one. The rule requires that all e-mails be downloaded (so that the rule can check them)
And now I have just read a thread in GQ that leads me to suspect my computer is infected (a shitload of ‘undeliverable mail’ type messages)
And I never click on fucking ‘microsoft critical update’ shit. Some of the lowlife methods these dickwads use to trick people into opening their filth make me want to swing a sledgehammer at them. If only the yellow slimey worms would show their gutless selves.
My favorite variety of canned meat mail is the trojan horse subject line, used to get past my spam filters. Something misleading like “How have you been”. I always think " I’ve been fine, and am very appreciative of your concern. It brightens my heart to know that others are concerned with my well being" before I realize that I don’t have a friend called agahlk23ba@bxcksjdrtksj.com
Yeah. My nightmare is that if I ever got responsible and backed up my drives…I’d back up the sneaky, latent “shove the lamp pole up your ASS” virus that only manifests itself when data is transferred from a backup onto a fresh, flushed and willing hard drive, wherein it proceeds to propagate itself into your address book, infecting all of your contacts with a mutation that only spreads and lies dormant until 1:32 am on 05/14/2004–at which point it tells the hard drive to write some junk data to the same sector of the drive 140 million times…or until the hard drive breaks which ever comes first…and then it pops up a message to all those affected, “This virus brough to you by MATCHKA!”
fucktards. Now they’ll read this post and create the sumbitch!
For filtering out spam, I’ve found that POPFile does a very good job. Bayesian filtering is one of the more popular methods of spam detection.
If you use Outlook (not Outlook Express), then you can integrate POPFile into Outlook using Outclass. Make sure to read the Outclass directions before installing POPFile (if you intent to use Outclass).
