Just opened my e--mails this morning, and reviewing the usual annoying Spam, I wondered what on earth sort of e-mail profile I must have to attract this load of rubbish!  Todays little lot included several for Viagra, Prozac (and similar) and non-specific prescription only medication - all without prescription, of course, 3 for (how to put this politiely:) ) male cosmetic surgery enhancing /enlarging a mans "manhood" !! ;) , 3 for USA based credit cards/mortgage deals for the financially challenged, 2 for hormone therapy to "restore youthful, sparkling looks", 1 for online gambling, and the piece de resitance, 1 from someone called Jennie (who I presume must be famale) saying  had found my name on a dating board and would like a date!!!! I think it is official - I must need therapy!  Does this mean that I am a  frustrated, depressed ,  wrinkled near bankrupt lesbian with  an underendowed male partner and a gambling problem? ;) ;)

What does your Spam say about you?
bye
Gwen
ps I HATE SPAM !!!;)

Hi GWEN. If you go to www.spamjab.co.uk and follow the instructions that will be the end of your spam emails and it is free. I am registered with them and have found it really excellent. No more spams!!!
Regards Anna.

I get exactly the same spam as you Gwen!!!!  Except the Gambling ones, lol :D :D  I get the drug ones most, and the Credit.  Also ways to make money from home, and how to get dubious online qualifications/diplomas!

Have you not had someone in America wanting to maintain your septic tank?? Maybe they don't have mains drains there?

Best wishes, John

i just get ones about dvd players for $50

Some people in the UK don't have main drains either, John, its no different really to the ones who sent stuff about the "uhum" extention stuff not knowing if you need it or not ;) :D

I know a lot of people do not have mains drains Isabel but can you imagine someone coming all the way over to the UK just to empty the septic tank? And I guess this particular bit of spam goes all over the world. As for "Ladies of the Night", I set up a hotmail account but never used it even once or gave the addy to anyone. I checked a couple of days later and found quite a few plying their wares. After 3 weeks I was recieving on average 260 per day!!! Needless to say I deleted the address from my machine and will never go there again. I understand that this type of spam tends to be only sent to addy's which look like a man, women appear not to fair so bad. An eldery friend was afraid to turn his machine on if his wife was around for fear of what would appear. I recomended that he change his Addy and used his wife's name. He still gets spam but not the obscene kind!

I considder Spam, along with Tellysales, as down right offensive and an invasion of my home. I see Bill Gates has said during the last month or so that he is going to rid the world of spam within the next 2 years. I'll believe that when I see it!

John

Oh!!! I agree with you John, my comment was meant to be entirely light hearted :) thought, in fact, you might be flattered by my hinting that you didn't need an "extention" either.

Incidently I use hotmail and have found that by setting the filters to fairly high and blocking the ones that do get though (they are often the same mailers, again and again) I would say I only get a handful a week now, fairly easy to deal with.

The worst item of junk email I seem to get at least twice daily is allegedly from security@microsoft.com and contains a virus in the attachment.  It tells me to download the patch to protect my machine!  I can't block the sender either as it doesn't come from the same place twice although always has the appearance of coming from microsoft. :-(

Has anyone used Spamgourmet, which is a website whose address you can use when filling in general forms and the email is filtered through them and forwarded to your own email address if needs be?

we are sick of the emails from nigeria or somewhere, saying hello my name is? i wonder if i can call on your discretion and services.
my government blar blar......i want to invest my money with you and share the profits or somthing like that.
we just delete.

I wish I knew who sends me highly pornographic emails despite our Ad aware thing that delays me getting on CD. Just spent 2 minutes deleting em and then another screed poured in. Huh.

Some of the photos which accompany the male enhancement offers are extremely graphic!  I am sure my spam increased incredibly after I joined e-bay.  But as all I have ever bought are Pug adn Am Cocker items why I look like a likely market for this rubbish is beyond me!  Look forward to having a septic tank offer - at least it is good old fashioned sh*t, not the nasty kind! ;)  Do you think people use other people e-mail addresses deliberately on some of these sites?  Otherwise I cant explain some of mine at all!
bye
Gwen

My spam say's I have floppy manhood :D
Sarah

It's strange, I have 2 email addresses (one is a hotmail)  and I never get spam but I do get loads of pop ups for most of what's already been mentioned, despite having a pop up killer. I think a lot of that is down to my 15 year old son though.....least I hope so.

Kath.

Have pity on me :(

Apparently I am a person who needs a chest enlargement AND a P**** enlargement , along with Via*ra and PRozac.  On top of this I also appear to be in need of vast quantities of money and various diplomas.  In spite of this many women (and men!!) want to get to know me and 'show me a good time'. 

I don't know whether to laugh or cry most days when checking my e-mails.

Dill

I get stacks and stacks of the viagra mails,Sam i also get the one from Nigeria asking for help???
BUT the ones that really p*ss me off are the porno ones,the pics are absolutely vile!!sometimes you can see what the girl had for breakfast if ya no what i mean,some of them are vomit worthy, animals,etc!!i have complained numerous times to my puter company but they say there is nothing they can do about them I can not afford to get them with an 11 year old in the house!! I also get the one that says "hi it's kate,we havnt spoke for a while i really miss our conversations"and then you scroll down and there is a naked pic from a dating service,they are all from the U.S so they are irelevant to us any way!
One thing that has helped is "blocking sender" under the tools icon,but the smarta**es just put a different name and send them out again!Some days i have over 100 in my e-mail box,how on earth do they get our e-mail addys? One thing i am suspicious about is my 15 year old stepson,when he visits he closes the door of the computer room and sits in there for hours and then the next day i get flooded with double the amount of porn,it is just too coincedental!Needless to say he must now keep the door OPEN,so i can pop my head in and check.
I dont think we will ever beat the spammers :(

christine

I don't know if your isp has the facility but aol's parental controls would be very useful to you - under 18's can be banned from accessing adult sites and everyone can have password protection on their part of aol.  You can also set a guardian which informs you of where they are browsing and limit the time/s they can use the net :D  MY what an evil step mother I'd make ;)

Dill

Christine,
you can get a free blocker for websites from here

http://www.we-blocker.com/

It's very good, you can mostly do your own settings and there is a log of which sites they've been on. I used to use it when my 2 lads were younger. One now has his own comp (he's 18) and the 15yo (ooh no he was 16 on Sat.) shares with me and when we had to reformat our disk I didn't bother putting it back on as I decided to trust him a bit more. I've definately got more porn pop ups since then (so I may be putting it back on. :D ) It may stop the emailers targeting you.      God, the joys of parenting!

Kath.

I don't seem to get any spam but my 10 yo daughter had an email from a girl which asked her about wheelchair access to a restaurant in London. I'm sure it wasn't genuine and we just deleted it. It was like whoever sent it was just trying to start up a conversation with her. Also we seem to have spyware downloaded onto our computer from somewhere and I dont know how to get rid of it.

Which spyware file have you got? We had one and I managed to dump it. I think if you put the name of the file, or the error message, into google it will give you the instructions to fix it ...

I'm really not sure. We downloaded spyhunter which told us there are a few files which pose a 'serious' problem but it didn't tell us how to get rid of them. I will search google - thanks :)

Have you tried Start menu....control panel....add/remove programmes? There should be a list of programmes on there, you may be able to delete it from there.

Thanks Kath, I have looked but can't see anything which is obviously the spyware - I'm not very good with computers :( - prehaps I'll ask my 10 yo to do it for me! :D 

Something that I would advise you all to do is disable the Preview pane that is default in Outlook Express.  This way the mail remains unopened.

When I get my mails in I then look at who they are from, and if they are unfamiliar then I right click the measge and check the Properties which tell me where the message came from, and if it is definately no-one I am likely to have a mesage from legitimately, then I delete, or block snder if they are really nasty.

If using Outlook Express, click on view, then click Layout.  You will get a box come up and in the bottom section un check the Preview pane option.

I am so glad it is not just me who gets the seriously wierd spam!  I was beginging to think I was living some sort of warped double life, and the sane me didnt remember what the other half was up to!!! ;) .  For the life of me I cant understand what they make out of it.  Do they harvest e-mail addresses from sites or lists or what, does anyone know?  Up until we got the strange poster with the nasty web site on here a couple of seeks ago I had never seen a porn web site,  I have never accessed a loan or financial services site, dating site or anything to do with an form of medical treatment at all, and no-one else uses my computer.  It seems a very strange way to try to scrape up business, bombarding millions of people who you have not idea about just on the off chance they may want your "highly specialised" services !  :)
bye
Gwen

Gwen, from what i have heard the spammers dont actually have our e-mails they have a system something like this; aaa@????.Co.uk
abb@????.com.au
Abc@????.com  etc.etc.  They continue on like this from A-Z sweeping up the e-mails inbetween eventually they will get a hit on someones e-mails and the non-exisent e-mail addys just bounce around in cyberspace,i'm hopeless at explaining things,hope you understand????The worst thing you can do is reply to them coz then they have your e-mail on file and will send it out to millions of other like wise related firms,sometimes down the bottom of the mails it says "click here to unsuscribe" or something similar,this is just a trap as it asks you to enter your e-mail address so you will receive no more e-mails from them,well i made the mistake of doing that once and within minutes i was bombarded with porn mails They have thousands of names and e-mail addresses,so every time i "block sender" i get the same mail but with different name or address,thats the bit that confuses me,do they know i have blocked them or is it just chance?As my blocked senders dont bounce back to the sender they automatically go in my deleted files,aaaarrggh just thinking about this is giving me a head-ache!!!
Oh and thanks for your advice guys :) i will look into the parental lock.

christine

christine