Anybody know what’s up with these spams? They seem to be advertising all sorts of different things–no clear connection between them other than the first few lines. I know I’m not filling out “feedback forms” on how to increase the size of my penis by 3 inches. (I mean, come on, isn’t 9 inches enough? 
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But seriously, is there anything I can do about them? My hotmail filters most junk mail out, but AOL seems to let’em right through.
Under no circumstances try to “unsubscribe” to them - doing so will only confirm your email account as active.
There really isn’t a lot you can do about them apart from reset your filters now and then to include whatever the new subject line “buzzword” is (these seem to change quite often).
On another note, it really annoys me that even though I have my Hotmail filters set to send emails with certain words in the subject line to my trashcan, the system actually directs them to the junkmail folder. So 6 days out of 7 my account is over its storage limit anyway (at least any new incoming spams bounce back to the sender).
It’s just another sleazy ploy by low-life spammers (redundant) to get you to read their crap.
There have been quite a few threads on here discussing spam in general, and the way Hotmail now seems more spam-friendly since they are selling server space. Search the archives.
unfortunately there is no way to avoid spam completely - anytime you post your email anywhere - whether it is on a chat forum or even the straightdope message board it can be found by a “web spider” (a program designed by spammers to find emails).
Even if you never give out your address, if its a hotmail or aol one etc. then the spammers just randomly generate possible emails and fire messages at them.
if you want to avoid spam then the best methods are:
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use a non-standard mail provider - i highly recommend www.postmaster.co.uk to all my clients and friends and i’ve been using it as my own mail provider for over 5 years now. By doing this you are less likely to be subjected to the random generation method - since spammers tend to focus their efforts on the biggies (yahoo, aol etc.)
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set up a second email address for registering to things with - this leaves your main email free to recieve proper messages whilst giving you an email that you can give out whenever you really have to. Then you can just check the second email once a week or so and mass-dump the spam and keep the one or two that are actually useful. when that email starts getting completely swamped you can ditch it and open a new one without any major problems…
I’ve gotten a lot of these, too. One just included some stuff that was utter nonsense, including “F*** YOU”, not an advertisement at all.
Even never posting your email anywhere won’t work. Recently the ISP I use has been flooded with ‘personalized’ spam. Since my username is a couple of random letters, anything that starts out “kgdm, you have been selected for…” is obviously crap.
The past week has been pretty bad, actually-- I’ve been getting 40 or 60 spams a day, which is a little much.