Bahtatboy

I've recently received the following (thanks to Hotmail for directing them to my Junk folder):

* Meet Jewish Singles Near You!
* Want Cindy Crawford's Skin?
* Go Back to Nursing School
* Is AGE REVERSAL now possible?
* You will feel like every woman wants your body
* Attend a traditional University, 100% online!

And I'm not sure about the senders of some of the others:

* Elskrgjcu Zfqwoef (although maybe he used to play for Chelsea?)
* Tztxd Qhnk
* Ystmulf Kvnhss

And then there's Christy:

My Dearest , My name is Christy Walton, the wife of late John T. Walton of Wal-Mart Supper Market. I have recently been diagnosed with esophageal cancer and a rare Heart Disease for 22 years, which has defiled all medical treatment. Expert diagnosis has shown that I have few months to live. I am worth $26.5 billion Dollars which I inherited from my late husband John T. Walton and which rates me as the second richest woman in the world...

britexpat76

http://www.419eater.com/

I love this website, Good place to lose a few hours reading how the baiters have beaten the scammers

the_red_sheep

Some great books by Neil Forsyth, where his character Bob Servant strings along the hoaxers - http://www.bobservant.com/books.html

Beakersful

I swear online shopping sites sell your emails on or something like that. Buy one item from a shop and untick all the "share your details with partners" boxes and the emails trickle in, then become a flood.

"Valued customer......"

I'm not your customer!

Irishbeekeeper

That **** Christy!! she said she would wait for me!

archie159

This works for me:
1. Register you own domain name (mydomain.com)
2. sign up for a hosting service that allows catch-all e-mail forwarding (some do, some don't)
3. everytime you shop online, use a unique e-mail prefix - eg [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; etc. You can even do the same for sites such as this ([email protected]). As long as you have catch-all forwarding, it doesn't matter what you put before the @ symbol, they'll all get forwarded to your actual e-mail address, which you never use for online shopping.
4. Next time you get spam, look at the address they have sent it to, and bingo - you can see who sold their address list (or had their database hacked) from the name in front of the @ sign. Send them a snotty complaint. If the spam e-mails to that particular address become a torrent, log-into your hosting service and black-list just that single "to" address.

I did this years ago; I've now blocked/blacklisted a few online shops for this reason, and very rarely get any spam from the others. Takes no more than a few minutes to sort, and for people who move a lot it is very useful to have your own, permanent e-mail domain to use wherever you live.

scrubbedexpat141

That has god to be the single saddest thing I've ever read.

No offence pal, I'm sure you're a top chap, but if you don't want emails from companies then just click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email...

auzdafluff

And far too technical. Besides, most don't have their own domain.

A far simpler way if you use gmail is to do [email protected] where you put a + and the shop name between your username and @gmail.com.

That will not only allow you to filter emails, but also find out who is selling your email address.

archie159

You're missing the point completely, and revealing a lot of naivety. If they are spamming you properly (I'm not talking about junk e-mails from a proper online shop), clicking unsubscribe just tells them that you are a real person who reads e-mails, and they'll re-double the number they send to you. Doing what I described, which literally takes no more than a few minutes (and your own domain can cost just a couple of dollars a year) can save you an immense amount of pain. One of my earlier e-mail addresses got on a proper scammers address list, and I was getting several hundred spam messages (of the type originally described in this thread) per day. It became completely unmanageable, and I was forced to change my e-mail address. As the e-mail address I had was provided by my ISP rather than my own (and that particular provider would only gave you one address), that was also a real pain, and then I needed to tell all my friends to change the address they used for me.

But if you think it is sad to spend about 10 minutes and a couple of dollars registering a domain, then you'd better just rely on the old "put your head in the sand while keeping your fingers crossed" approach and hope you never get properly spammed.

archie159

It's not technical at all (at least, not for anyone capable of managing online shopping successfully), and I'd say at least half my friends have their own domain these days - especially those people who move around a lot. That being said, I didn't know you could add a "+shop" to ones gmail username - if that does indeed work, then that approach is also good, for gmail users at least.

scrubbedexpat141

Gmail's spam filter is pretty good. I never get those emails in my inbox.

It's also not that tought to just swipe and tap on my iphone to delete any from shops that I'm not interested in today.

norsk

I'm not disputing that the technique you've described is effective, but you have to be somewhat paranoid and/or overrun with spam before such drastic measures are needed.

I have my own domain and I turned off the catch-all functionality a couple of years ago as I was getting all the shit that the bots guessed were legitimate addresses on my domain.

Very few retailers actually sell email addresses when they are not allowed to. Most of the time it is a case of their website automatically opting you in to receiving emails from third parties (rather than automatic opt out which is the recommended best practice). So when you receive 'spam' it could be that you just didn't understand what you agreed to when you gave them your email address. I'm not defending what they are doing, but they didn't actually do anything you didn't tell them they couldn't. There is also a chance that an employee stole the email database and sold it on to some dodgy list service who then passed it on at a fee to someone else (in which case unsubscribe as mentioned by Scampy is fine and you will be removed from the list service).

Obviously if you use your email on a few 'dodgy' sites then you will be receiving buckets of spam. Another risky thing to do is to register on forums (not because of the forum owners are dodgy, but because a lot of the time they are easily hacked and the email database stolen).

The only way to guarantee not receiving any spam is to not have an email address...

DOHDUBMAN

Mate ive been looking for that for about four years!! does this have the one with the story where the guy sent them out into the sea for gold or something? Using GPS the lot??

scrubbedexpat141

I love the ones with sculptures.

Beakersful

The tattoo 419er response was best.