Does anyone out there know how to get even with the spammers who clutter up our email with their junk? If you try to unsubscribe it just shows them that you looked at it and you get even more. Yahoo lets me block up to 100 addresses, but that's just a drop in the bucket.
Oh carp... I just joined Yahoo yesterday .. I hope I don't start getting a lot of crap ... thankfully I gave them my 'special' email account... which I don't really use .. so it won't affect me ... too much .. I hope.
I don't much like the stupid place though ... how can they use such an old antiquated 'forum' type of organization?
It sucks... its hard as hell to navigate your way around .. and get to what you want quickly.
Its like some government program with rules from the 70's or something.
And the useful portion of the screen is shrunk down to what... 25 percent of the whole screen ?
WTF is that ?
Don't respond to them, just delete them.
When you hit "unsubscribe", sure, they unsubscribe you, but then they sell your email address, because it's active.
If you ignore them, they'll go away.
I have a Yahoo address I never use, and it doesn't get ANY junk mail.
david
I'm sorry, but I don't understand your problem with Yahoo, Fred. I see a small side panel on the left side of the screen but it doesn't interfere with anything. My only complaint is the Spam.
It's hard to deal with spam on freemail systems like Yahoo. They have built in Spam filtering options that do some good, but don't allow enough customization.
I used Outlook, and what I've found to work very well is I set up custom rules to send a variety of things to the junk folder. Any sort of tag line that is commonly in spam: "click here to un-subscribe", "ADV:", etc. - gets thrown in the junk folder.
I set up all my legitimate mailing lists with sperate rules that sort them into folders and then stop processing rules, so they don't get junked if they have un-subscribe info on the bottom of the message. When I sign up for a new list, I make a new rule.
This gets 90% of my junk mail, though it does require tweaking the rules over time. I get about 60 spam messages a day, so it alleviates a lot of my frustration.
I personally don't choose to have it delete them automatically, just in case something falls through the cracks. A quick scan of my Junk Mail folder can usually find legitimate emails that have fallen through.
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Of course none of this applies to Yahoo, which is your situation; I just thought I'd share. Spam is a scourge on the Internet - I wish there were more direct ways to tackle it.
simon
>>Spam is a scourge on the Internet - I wish there were more direct ways to tackle it.<<
I chase down the headers, find out where it came from, and then sign THAT address for the DMA "Sucker List" - ensuring they get a whole boatload of what they just gave me.
Thing is, the primary spam-center of the universe is the DMA, Direct Marketing Association, and supposedly you can "opt-out" by contacting them, but more often than not those who do so wind up with more spam, so I would not exactly believe them.
The key, in junkmail, telemarketing, or spamming, is to get yourself "blacklisted"...I've been a telemarketer for a short period before leaving in disgust, and spamming is very similar in many ways.
Firstoff - don't bother with do-not-call lists or unsubscribe, etc...it will ensure you get further unwanted ads and possibly harrassment (askin to be put on a do-not-call-list damn near guarantees midnight-prank calls, believe it).
In order to reduce the amount of spam and hassle you get, the key is to make things difficult for them, in hopes of getting yourself "blacklisted", and believe me, the blacklist does exist in this business, but not as a universal measure, each company generally maintains their own.
How to get on it ? simple.
Hurt them, cost them money, or interfere with their operations to the point where they want nothing to do with you.
My personal favorite bandwidth-choking retaliation is to find out where the spam came from in the first place, and give that Email address to the DMA as a "live one" to be put on the "Sucker" (has actually fallen for this crap a time or two, and therefore gets ten TIMES as much) listings.
But if you really wanna kill spam, dead, dead, dead ?
Take the MONEY out of it.
The pay-per-click system is, in fact, the root of all spam.
The good ole fashioned "Click HERE to continue" crap would not exist at the level it does were it not for pay-per-click.
I fail to see any benefit to this system other than the encouragement of spam, nasty flashing, eye-searing, distracting ad banners, and hostile java applications all designed to "force" a net user to those clicks, which make the spammer money.
If you took the money out of it by killing pay-per-click, spam would not be lost and forgotten, but it would damn sure reduce it by 80% or more.
Cut off the head, and while the body may flop around a while, the beast is certainly dead.
Outlaw or Destroy the pay-per-click system, and see an 80% reduction in spam, which wastes time, money and resources ?
That's a political budget issue I can get with.
How bout you ?
-R
OK Ree, Now tell us how to do all this.
I prefer not to get the government involved. It is already too bloated and intrusive enough as it is.
I like Ree's idea of retaliation, as long as it doesn't evolve into a "spam war", tit for tat.
david
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