Spam emails how come i get them with a new unused email address?

**sanjuro** · 7th May 2003

For the last 4 months or so the number of spam emails i receive has skyrocketed i get 30-40 everyday now does everyone else get this many now?

anyway what i want to know is how when i added my totally unused claranet email to Outlook i had 1684 spam emails to download, this was taking ages so i got clara to delete them for me How did they get hold of my UNUSED email address???

sanjuro

**mancroft** · 7th May 2003

are you realy sure that you haven't used it? really, really sure???

all i can think of is that someone is using a random name generator. i suppose that might work. unless they have taken the username at the front of the email from somewhere else and bunging that on the front of loadsa different endings.

not very helpful so far.

you could try http://www.neaturl.com/ which does free email alias forwarding.

**God is a DJ** · 7th May 2003

dont they sell their email lists to the evil spamming companies?

DJ

**sanjuro** · 7th May 2003

No i have never ever used the clara net mail address i didnt know i had one untill the other day (i have a claranews acc) i told the clara support guy i had never used it and he said a load of bollox about ''them getting it off my pc while i was surfing' LOL i said how could they i only have a news account with you and the email address that i didnt know i had (clara) was only told to me by another clara support guy a few hours ago.
I said that Clara must be selling email addresses and he said they do not (liar i think now)

i get about 15 spam emails a day now on my clara email which i still have not EVER used or told to anyone

sanjuro

**ffrr** · 8th May 2003

have you tried unsubscribing from them, I know you say there's allot but it does help cut down on spam in the long run.

**dingle_666** · 8th May 2003

10 a day its spreading like a forrest fire

**4me2** · 8th May 2003

Originally posted by ffrr
have you tried unsubscribing from them, I know you say there's allot but it does help cut down on spam in the long run.

unsubscribing is in most cases just a trick they use to check that your email account is still active.

**tef89** · 8th May 2003

Trying to un-subscribe, as 4me2 said, is a really bad idea. I've had several accounts - some get no spam and others like my btopenworld and Tiscali get literally buried. Now I just have one private email account I use for trusted sites like the forums I use and I have another main one I use for activation of accts etc.

Whether your acct get spammed does have a lot to do with who the acct is with so you can draw your own conclusion from that. Some of it may well be connected with the provider's filtering at their server level. If it's an acct you are determined to use then some anti-spam software could be useful.

**5bellies** · 9th May 2003

Most ISPs, like BT, that use a simple xxx@btopenworld.com account structure get spammed like funk. I get a ton through bulk mailed (cc'd) to xxxa, xxxb, xxxc etc.

The addresses that are xxx@yyy.freeserve.co.uk (and the like) seem to get less, since the odds of randomly hitting the yyy are greatly reduced. Never had a single spam to the xxxx@yyy.vcisp.net account I held in six months, my hotmail account got spammed in the first week. Neither got publicised anywhere.

ABCMan · 9th May 2003

i get about 700 a week to my old lineone account, the odd thing is it only started after tiscali bought them out, looking at tiscalis support forums and its plain that many others are suffering in the same way, tiscali deny selling their userlists, but i think its users know better

**GETanner** · 9th May 2003

I use this program, POPFile http://popfile.sourceforge.net/old_index.html to filter all my email accounts and it currently has an accuracy rate of over 98%.

Takes a week or so to really train the filters but on a daily inflow of 100 emails per day, it does a fantastic job of geting rid of the Spam.

Add this program, HotMail Popper www.boolean.ca and you can also grab your Hotmail via any POP3 Email client and use POPFile to filter out the spam.

Would recommend this to anyone.

G