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Email H-E-L-P!
se7en - 13/4/13 at 05:28 PM

Recently I have been getting an inordinate amount of spam to my hotmail account. I did not get that much before, maybe one or two a month. I initially added the address of the spammer to my Hotmail blacklist but the spam kept coming. I now know that the addresses I added were faked and the real spammers address was elsewhere within the email.

To try and find who is passing on my address to spammers I did a Google search for my email address. I got two results; the first was Startrek Russia site but looking through the pages of that site I could not find my address there (found lots of others on the index page). The second site was called Download Email and I found my email address there. This site sells email lists by the million.

My dilemma is - if I contact Download Emails and ask them to remove my address (a)will they do it or (b)will they say 'that has confirmed that address' and totally ignore me. Even if they do remove it now from current lists, I have all the lists that they have sold to clear.

Does anyone have any idea how I can remove my email address from all the lists that this site controls?

Any help with this would be gratefully appreciated.

Se7en

BenB - 13/4/13 at 05:39 PM

Can you do auto-forward on Hotmail? If so I'd just forward it to googlemail and then forward that to a new Hotmail address....

If you contact them they'll just know you're for real. And as you say they'll have flogged the list to loads of different sites. Your e-mail address is toast.

Slimy38 - 13/4/13 at 06:05 PM

Do not contact the spammers, all you will be doing is making your address more valuable. Switch on as many spam filters as you can, I can't remember what Hotmail has to offer but most do a wildcard filter. From memory, I filter anything ending in anything other than com and co.uk, anything with a number in the second bit, anything where I'm cc'ed rather than to'ed, anything with a medical term in the title, and a fair few others. Whenever I get a new batch of emails I try and identify a common theme and add another filter.

The spam does eventually die out, but it took mine about three years to get down to ten a day.

britishtrident - 13/4/13 at 06:41 PM

Hot Mail and Spam go together like peaches and cream, but you can walk away from away from a Hot Mail or GMail account.

We get hardly any spam our main email comes in via email addresses in our own domain names and is then forwarded to mailboxes on our ISP (Plusnet) account and as a result get filtered twice. Normally mail is read via Thunderbird on a PC and as a result gets filtered again but if we need Webmail access this can be done via Plusnet. Mobile access is via K-9 Mail Android App.

The cost of setting up a domain name to use to provide email addresses is minimal about £6 for 2 years will get you a domain something like firstname-lastname.co.uk on which can create multiple mailboxes such as anyname@firstname-lastname.co.uk

[Edited on 13/4/13 by britishtrident]

Ninehigh - 13/4/13 at 08:35 PM

One or two a month? There's 19 in my spambox and I cleared it this morning!

se7en - 13/4/13 at 08:55 PM

Thanks to all who have contributed, your help is very much appreciated.

quote:
Originally posted by BenB
Can you do auto-forward on Hotmail? If so I'd just forward it to googlemail and then forward that to a new Hotmail address....

If you contact them they'll just know you're for real. And as you say they'll have flogged the list to loads of different sites. Your e-mail address is toast.


Firstly, I do not intend to contact Download Emails or the spammer.

I do have a Gmail account that I have not used in years. If I redirect all my Hotmail to the Gmail account is there a way of rejecting the spam? If Gmail rejects the email I would have thought that the spammer would then know that it was Gmail that rejected a message that was sent to a Hotmail address.


quote:
Originally posted by Slimy38
Do not contact the spammers, all you will be doing is making your address more valuable. Switch on as many spam filters as you can, I can't remember what Hotmail has to offer but most do a wildcard filter. From memory, I filter anything ending in anything other than com and co.uk, anything with a number in the second bit, anything where I'm cc'ed rather than to'ed, anything with a medical term in the title, and a fair few others. Whenever I get a new batch of emails I try and identify a common theme and add another filter.

The spam does eventually die out, but it took mine about three years to get down to ten a day.


I have switched on as many filters as I can with Hotmail but it is still mounting up daily. I have had this Hotmail address since I started using the Internet in the early 90's and I am reluctant to let it go as all of my friends and family use it. As previously said I did not get that many spam email but this past but this past two months it has started to mount up from 5 or 6 a day at the start to 18 or 19 today.

From reading through Hotmail, I understand that they do remove junk mail over 10 days old and they have been doing so. I believed, maybe mistakenly, that they blacked the sender of any junk mail they removed.

My missus has a Hotmail account and webmail through her business. She was able to link her Hotmail and webmail accounts and by the use of filters she has almost stopped her Hotmail junk, I think she is down to one a month at most.

If I knew the exact way of setting up the Hotmail/Gmail accounts and thought that this would get rid of the spam I would do it.


Se7en