Morning everyone. Ive just been to look at my e mails, and to my horror there is one there titled as "child p*rn" Does anyone know if there is anywhere I can report this to? I havnt opened it, so dont know exactly what it contains. Thanks.

phillipa ....if you highlight the message and right click your mouse on it you can then click *properties* and then *details* you should be able to read who sent it and from which ISP. You should report it to that ISP .

It *could* be an email about the horrors of child pr0n of course rather than containing it but I can understand fully your reluctance to open it :(

Melody

Philippa, if the email is about child p*rn and it is really worrying you, then contact your local police station and ask to speak to the computer crime officer. If you are really lucky, your police force will have one ;-) If not the only other thing you can do is contact you ISP or DELETE.

NB: Don't forget the p*rn rule

Hi Phil - ugh! The Lothian & Borders police have an internet crime unit so your police force most likely has one, but the sender will almost certainly have used an anonymiser and so probably won't be easy to trace. IMO you should grit your teeth and open it. (You may get a virus, but that can be sorted). Then if the e-mail really is child p*rn, ring the police and report it, if for no other reason than to protect yourself.

Is there any chance that you inadvertently visited a p*rn site? Its become quite common for p*rn sites to submit innocent search words (ie 'dog') to the search engines, so that the unsuspecting searcher arrives at their site. Then the user's e-mail addy/ DNS is logged. There is also some very nasty software that allows p*rnographers to access other people's innocent websites and add a 'blind' link that either logs visotors' e-mail addresses and/or leads to a p*rn pop-up. If there is no pop-up, the computer user doesn't even know that the p*rn pedler has logged their e-mail address

Sorry to say if the police can't/won't help, inconvenient as it is, you should change your e-mail address asap. Not only do you not want to get any more of this stuff, p*rn peddlers also seem to enjoy distributing viruses. You should also think about setting up a firewall (if you want help with any of that, let me know).

Also, if this really is child p*rn, its not impossible that all sorts of nastiness has already ben downloaded to your hard disk without your knowledge. If you report it to the police and they are helpful, that's fine. Otherwise, again let me know and I can probably help you to exterminate any nastiness that might cause you problems if your computer ever goes in for service.

Hi everyone, thanks for the help. I phoned the police and they put me through to the p*rn squad, who were very interested and helpful. As I cannot use my phone and pc at the same time, I had to look at it and report to them what it actually was, and it really was child p*rn. They have made a note that I reported it, and had only opened it at their request. They have asked me not to delete it yet, as they may be sending someone round to see it. The e mail address was obviously fake, it was childp*rn@childp*rn. I do the regular virus updates, and have my spam filter on, but I was sooo shocked to recieve this, it made me feel quite horrible for a while. Thanks again all for your help xxx

Admin Edit: p*rn rule!

That's nasty :( There are some very odd people around.

Fiona
x x x

I've been getting loads of 'adult' emails sent to me since I registered for home delivery with ASDA - has anyone else had this problem??

Fiona,
I got a lot of "adult" e-mails but I don't know what caused it but after I followed their instructions about "unsubscribing" they stopped.
Dot

I've tried that but I'm still getting some of them :(

Fiona
x x x

Abuse of any sort can be reported to the ISP by pressinf reply but omitting everthing before the at the typing in abuse for example.

preidie@yahoo.com

reply but delete the preidie and add abuse

abuse@yahoo.com

this way the mail actually goes with it , the will contact if they need to.

It does work as had a few dodgy ones myself and they have done something about it..

Pam

I get them too and have been unsuccessful stopping them. I just add them to my junk mail list and then go in once a week and delete all junk mail.

I get them aswell, I have sent so many e mails back to tell them to stop sending me e mails, no notice taken. I end up just deleting them now..:(

Natasha

I get a lot of unwanted mail and it seems to cycle beweeen loans/mobile phones and p*orn. Have recently discovered a very useful programme (free) which directs all such mail directly into your bin (or a file of your choice).

It is better than others I have tried because it already has a vast databank of addresses to delete so you don't have to start from scratch - this makes it easier to use than Outlook Express's settings

Spam Pal

You have to watch it to start with as it might delete mail from addresses you know are okay but you can add any email address (or ISP) to it's whitelist or blacklist. It is easy to set up and even has picture diagrams to assist!!

Christine

This sort of thing is absolutely rife at the moment I hate to say. The older your email address is the more problematic it becomes. Half the reason for this is that for about $50 US you can buy a list of 10 million email addresses. These are "farmed" from various sources but any marketing list is one of them. Next time you register on a site then you should always make sure that the tick box (if there is one or similar) saying that you dont want to be notified of any future garbage etc is ticked.

Sadly I dont think it helps really. My current email address is my work address also and I get about a dozen mails a day of a nature I would rather not have sent to me. And lets be honest - Im a guy and that probably takes some doing <joke>

You can set up your mail box to automatically delete these on incoming by looking for certain words for example in the header. If anybody is getting frustrated with spam of this sort then let me know and Ill help you set up filters in your mailbox providing you have outlook or outlook express or similar (most do).

Ah well - what a world we live in!

Daren

Off topic..

Daren, I forgot to thank you for sorting out my modem drivers for me the other month. Thank you .. you are a star :-)

Never reply to them direct as it will get worse..

Pam

The trouble is ...if you do what they say an UNSUBSCRIBE it shows the spammers that it is a live email account and your spam will double in no time at all as they pass the address' on to other firms

Never , EVER reply to spam , even to unsubscribe

Melody

Thanks for that advice Melody, things like that are very handy to know for novices like me :D

Took me a while to get up to speed on things like that too phillipa ;)

Melody

Another tip:

if you leave your email address in a post etc replace the @ with (at)
eg: leigh(at)champdogs.co.uk. This way your email address will not be automatically trawled by the spammers. :-)

NB: If you need to use your email address for a login system, you must use the original @ method or it won't work ;-)