Email spammers

[Jim Koepke]

My way of handling this is to have multiple email accounts. One is my "junk mail" account. This one is given out freely to just about anyone. Supposedly it was closed about 10 years ago when we moved. Somehow the "disconnect order" got misplaced.

One of my accounts is a private account only a few of my friends know and use. Others are for various needs for businesses with legitimate reasons to contact me.

It keeps most of the junk in one place and easier with which to deal. It is amazing how when one site gets your eddress it is often shared with a dozen others.

Most people who have been given my eddress also know it is not viewed by me kindly if they share my information.

The MacOS mail reader used to have a "bounce" option for unwanted email. It would send it back looking like it was rejected as a bad eddress. This did help with some automatic spam generators.

It isn't hard to generate a message to get bounced and then with a little editing make it look like it isn't a forwarded message to fool an auto-mailer.

jtk

[Bill Jobe]

I use Google for mail service and they kill well over 99% of spam. The rest goes into the spam box. I don't recall the last time any spam got past Google. Nobody does mail better than Google.

I have my Gmail account linked to my Hotmail account.
Know of any way to run all of my Hotmail messages through gmail's filters that you know of?
The idea of dropping my Hotmail account is unsettling since I've used it forever for all of my personal and business contacts.

[Carlos Alvarez]

I have my Gmail account linked to my Hotmail account.
Know of any way to run all of my Hotmail messages through gmail's filters that you know of?
The idea of dropping my Hotmail account is unsettling since I've used it forever for all of my personal and business contacts.

You can have Gmail check other accounts and centralize all the mail. I have no idea if the spam filters work then, because a lot of filtering is done DURING the transfer of the mail to start with. I don't know the step by step but this seems to have answers: https://www.google.com/search?ei=PLa....0.WcHXhRFJqJg

I've switched addresses a few times and always see it as a nice refreshing clean mailbox where only current contacts can reach me.

[Stephen Tashiro]

Makes me pine for the old days when they'd come to your door and you could mess with their heads and waste their time by inviting them in and have them go through their whole song and dance, then tell them you intentionally held them up to spare others at least for a while.

Uh.... I'll take the new days instead.

[Carlos Alvarez]

Uh.... I'll take the new days instead.

Yeah, it reminds me that we haven't seen door to door people selling their religion or junk for some time. We don't answer the door at all for strangers.