E-mail question

[Mariposa De La Luna]

I started recieving all sorts of junk mail in my inbox lately. I use block sender but it just keeps coming. I try to send replys but they just bounce back. I don't want to change my address. What can I do? :(

[Jenett]

Sending replies to email spam usually just tells them they've got a functional address. This doesn't help much, and your address will get passed around by unethical peopl.

(The one exception is if it's something you do know you signed up for, but you don't want to get anymore, like announcement mail from a company or website. Then it's fine to use their unsubscribe function.)

What I usually do is report them to http://spamcop.net - they're a service (free of charge) that helps you report the spam to the right people (the person's providers, and to their upstream providers as well.)

You do have to register (they've had problems with people abusing their system in the past, so they want to be able to deal with such abusers efficiently) and once you've registered, you'll be sent a specific URL for you to use (and a few other instructions.) You then bookmark that address, and any time you want to report spam, you just copy the message (with the message headers in it) into the right box on the form, and submit it. (There are some defaults you can change, but if you don't know much about reading headers, just accept the defaults.) You do need to provide an email address to them (because they use that email address to send to administrators, so that if they do have questions, they can get in touch with you. That hasn't happened to me yet, though. I own a domain name with unlimited alias addresses, so I just set one up that's spamreport@gleewood.org, so that I can track what comes in there.

This will send reports of spam to the right people (they make note of which providers don't respond to such requests, and make sure to provide upstream addresses for those)

They also offer filters you can install, thoguh that might be more problematic (you need to approve people to email you first, or else the first time someone mails you, they'll get a URL to click on to confirm it's not spam) which might be more trouble than it's worth, depending. (I tend to get a fair amount of email from people who haven't emailed me before that I *want* to get, so it's not a very tempting idea to me.)

Hope that helps...

[Mariposa De La Luna]

Thanks a ton! :D
I'll try it!