BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: Grab
Date: 06 May 03 - 04:38 PM

I could sympathise with Hotmail, but they're doing a crappy job of filtering my spam. I'm typically getting a couple of dozen or so a day, of which only one or two get filtered.

Unfortunately my Yahoo account has just been found too. They're *very* good at detecting spam though, so it doesn't inconvenience me much.

Graham.

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 06 May 03 - 11:33 AM

LH -

The vast majority email addresses on the spammers lists are not put there because you gave your email addy to a "reputable" site. Of course, when you give your addy to the Turbo Tax people, every brokerage house that has an account with them will get it, and will send you at least an occasional offer, but for the most part the circulation and distribution of these addresses is pretty limited.

Spammers do launch "crawlers" that look for addresses posted on discussion threads like this one, so putting your address up in a forum is likely to get you on a list. Especially if (unlike here) it's a list frequented by "gullible" people.

Some of the spam lists are produced by someone hacking into ISPs with poor security; and there have been reports of "ungruntled" employees selling legitimate lists; but most are "generated" by simply "making up" addresses, sending a message, and keeping a list of the ones that get delivered.

There are only about 12 million possible combinations of 5 letter "names." Pick the "top twenty" email providers, and you've got about 240 million possible addresses. It's about an hours work - or a very few hours at most - to send a message with a "click here to be taken off our list" to every one of these possible addresses with a couple of decent machines and a fast connection. And you don't have to sit around and watch while the machines do the work.

If 10% of the possibles are "good" addresses, you've hit 24 million names worth possibly 0.01 cent each. If 1% of the good ones are naive enough to hit the button, you've confirmed 240,000 addresses, worth about 0.3 cent per address - $700 for a couple of hour's machine time. (The market price fluctuates, and you do need to know where to sell your lists.)

It might take a whole day for some kid's machine to run the 6-letter possibles while the kid's at school - or at his school's computer club where he's sharing how to do it with a dozen of his buddies. (They'll probably leave the school's computer(s) running overnight too, if they think they won't get caught.)

One of the "pro" spammers recently was reported to have claimed his (few hundred - off shore, of course) servers could - "if he wanted to" - run all likely 10 character addresses in "a day or two."

John

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 06 May 03 - 10:32 AM

People could defeat this kind of thing by ALWAYS giving totally false information to all surveys, including false email addresses. This would be a good way of fighting back. Make them waste their time and money till they stop bothering people.

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: katlaughing
Date: 06 May 03 - 08:55 AM

I also never give my real age or birthdate; cheeky bastards for even asking, imo!

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 06 May 03 - 08:35 AM

Gurney -

In Windows Explorer, you can go to the cookie directory and delete any cookies you don't want. There's no particular problem with doing that.

In Win 98, go to C:\Windows\Temporary Internet Files

In Win XP or Win 2000, go to C:\Documents and Settings\Username\Cookies.

In Win XP or Win2000 "username" may mean you have to look at several "cookies" folders, since you'll usually have an "Administrator," an "All Users," and at usually least one "string" with your name - there's a cookies folder in each of them, that you need to check if it's the first time you've cleaned house.

Delete everything that doesn't have "mudcat" or "digitalriver" in its filename. - Well, actually, you might want to leave the cookie from your ISP, and maybe from your bank ...

Most cookies are relatively harmless, but you probably want to get rid of any that say "fastlink" or "adclick" or "doubleclick" and any that don't have a clear name to show where they came from.

The worst that can happen if you delete a good one is that you may have to "log in" again somewhere. They'll always give you a new one.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: Gurney
Date: 06 May 03 - 07:31 AM

Be careful who gets your address. My spam was minor before I sent for some 'free' software, and now the spammers know things like my age and sex, which I can only remember putting on the sales form. That was a commercial site, not a free download site like Tucows.
The software was rubbish, too.
NEVER reply to spam.
One day I'll find out how to delete everything except named cookies.

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: Dave Bryant
Date: 06 May 03 - 06:39 AM

You can always make sandwiches out of the Spam. Not much that I can do with porn though - I don't own a pornograph to play it on.

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: katlaughing
Date: 06 May 03 - 12:55 AM

I use Ad Aware and Zone Alarm which both seem to have worked quite well. I also have a bogus addy listed as first in my email addy book for any worms that might try to use my email addresses to send to.

I second what Jeri said:

FOR PETE'S SAKE, IF YOU SEND MASS MAILINGS, PLEASE HIDE THE RECIPIENT LIST!!!


Use the BCC, please!!

kat

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: Little Hawk
Date: 06 May 03 - 12:10 AM

My solution to this common problem was elegant and simple. I got a friend to write and install a little software program that automatically collects all the Spam and Porn and reroutes it to Spaw's email address.

I'm not gonna tell you what it is, though. He's suffered enough.

- LH

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 05 May 03 - 10:04 PM

Ad Aware
I have the Norton firewall, and that keeps most of those cookies and pop-up pages out. Sometimes these programs clash if you use more than one, so it's best to read the fine print on these before installing.

I tried the free Zone Alert before going to the Norton program. I couldn't get my email to move with ZA.

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: Ian Darby
Date: 05 May 03 - 09:24 PM

Lavasoft do a free download called Ad Aware.

It enables you to seek out and delete the Data Miner programs installed when you visit web sites.

These rascals collect info on what you've looked at and pass it on to herberts whose sole purpose in life is to generate Spam.

Have a look at the above, you'll be surprised at how much stuff is sitting in your PC that you weren't even aware of.

Bestest Regards, and Good Luck....

Ian Darby.

P.S. Also see Zone Labs 'Zone Alert' free download.

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 05 May 03 - 08:26 PM

PfE

The situation may be a little different in Essex, but when I tried referring a few dozen particularly obnoxious pieces to my ISP I was informed that the headers were all phony, and they couldn't trace the sources. I tried looking at a few others, and found the same obvious situation. I don't figure there's much chance that blocking the "indicated" source is going to do a lot of good, since the next one will be "faked" from a different address.

The volume I get has dropped from about 300 per week when the account was first opened (there were 140 pieces there the first time I looked at it, which was within an hour of "creating" the account) to about 80 per week since I just started deleting them as quickly as possible - before they're downloaded if I can - and keeping the inbox, junk mail, and trash bin empty.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: GUEST,Peter from Essex
Date: 05 May 03 - 07:20 PM

Short answer - Don't have an email account.

If I have a little free time I check the headers from the day's spam on SpamCop and report them to the relevant ISPs. I have no idea if it does any good at all but I feel better for it.

Any offers of Norton products should be reported to Symantec as they do try to track down people pirating their software.

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: NicoleC
Date: 05 May 03 - 12:38 PM

Yes, AOL is *very* good at blocking spam. (Unfortunately, they are also good at selling their subscriber list to spammers they approve of, which is another topic). So is Hotmail. Both are such huge targets, however, that users are almost inevitably deluged anyway.

Recently, MSN and AOL agreed to team up on their anti-spam software development. That IS good news.

I never get any spam to either of my personal addresses (see security measures above), but I manage a couple of mailing lists. Anything being posted that isn't from a subscriber gets bounced to me for review. Egad, it's a lot of spam, even though we have filters in place. Recently, ZERO spam has been getting through. Unfortunately, the company that ultimately owns and runs the mailing lists won't tell me what they did!

Work is another story -- I can't change my address there and it's published as a customer contact. Not much to do but grit my teeth and hope the anti-spam efforts in progress will help.

I know of no way to get your account off spammer lists, and once it's on one your address will be resold forever. Numerous utilities exist to preview you mail and dump the spam first; none of them have ever appealed to me.

NEVER click the unsubscribe link or reply to spam, unless it's a legitimate company you've heard of. Reply or unsubscribe links are usually just harvester programs that then tag your address as being a good one, making it a more valuable commodity to resell.

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: Jim McLean
Date: 05 May 03 - 11:27 AM

I use AOL and get about a dozen spams a day. I couldn't log on today as AOL had blocked my password. They had noticed my account was responsible for sending 500 emails yesterday and they realised that was suspicious. Someone had hijacked my address. AOL gave me a new password which I obviously changed after logging on.
Jim McLean

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: Bat Goddess
Date: 05 May 03 - 10:59 AM

In almost 2 years I have received only 1 piece of spam at my regular e-mail address.

But I also keep a Yahoo address specifically for e-mail lists and any time I have to fill out an internet form with my e-mail address, etc.

Yahoo does a pretty decent job of diverting all the spam to the "Bulk Mail" folder -- which I check before deleting just in case the filter's a bit off, which it can be. And some spam gets into the regular account in-box as well. But that'sokay -- I have a delete key.

Had a company AOL account several years ago and it was notorious for attracting spam, but I think that was primarily because that's also where I got my lists, etc.

The problem is that there is so much of it that I have to delete it every day (sometimes several times a day) and I'm hoping that when I'm away for a long weekend, e-mail that I want doesn't bounce because my box is full (with mostly spam).

Linn

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: mack/misophist
Date: 05 May 03 - 10:20 AM

My spam seems to come in surges; not too much one day and tons the next. Rather than use a filter that might remove something I need to see, I use my shell account and pine to edit the mail folder. With pine, I can delete 100 spams in about 15 seconds.

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: Peg
Date: 05 May 03 - 10:15 AM

I was shocked to hear someone say AOL is good for avoiding spam...I have an AOL address I have been using for years; it is thoroughly corrupted with spam of all types; any way I can rectify this or is it too late???

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: Stilly River Sage
Date: 05 May 03 - 09:57 AM

John,

I've tried just about all of the things mentioned here. It's a running battle to keep this crud out of your mail, no matter how you manage it.

I use Earthlink, which merged a number of years ago with Mindspring, the originator of the "Spaminator" program. I use that, and though some spam gets through, I'd say 75-90% it gets caught. It does go in cycles, as new banks of spam addresses are introduced, there's a learning curve for the program. It doesn't cost me any extra to use it, and with multiple email accounts, it works for all of them. Spaminator relies on reports from users, however, to work properly. So though I just delete spam often enough, it builds in volume until I take the time to open the spam header (always examine the size to be sure you're not opening a worm or virus), copy the whole thing into a new mail and send it to [e-mail]. Spam in my mailbox drops off again, and when I visit my account every day or two at Spaminator, I delete a couple of pages at a time (20 per page).

Pegasus has some pretty good filters. Eudora has a fee program for a filter I've never used. Yahoo mail has a way to block messages, and I would think that if you put an * in the right field, you could block anything with * in the subject line. You always have the option to scan the list of spam before deleting (though most of these will automatically empty after a couple of weeks) and tweaking it so legitimate mail gets past the filter.

My biggest concern are the browsers. IE and Netscape go out merrily on their way, advertising my email address wherever I go. I tried blocking it in my Netscape, and had to reset my email again before I could receive any. But that is one idea--to simply go into your browser and remove your email address so it can't leave that behind wherever you browse. You'll have to go back an manually replace it any time you want to check your email if it is connected with a browser. I also subscribe to Anonymiser, because there are times when I'm doing web searches, such as through Google, that no matter what the topic, you're bound to hit sneaky sites that have put keywords in their metadata to get them included in searches. You'll leave behind a lot of information if you're not using a firewall or other software to block the transmission.

So the answer to one of John's questions is that yes, I have one address in particular that I've had for a long time that one of these days I hope to close down and leave the spam behind, but that isn't really the answer. I've brow beat (and probably lost) a few friends for sending long lists of names any time they send a petition or a piece of humor. I used to send humor frequently, but in the last couple of years, I send very little, and generally send it individually. BCC is the feature to use when sending to mulitiple people so everyone doesn't get the names, but something tells me that the list isn't as secure as I'd like it to be. Anyway, when your address is in one of those horrible long emails that someone sends in which several other Luddite senders have not figured out to clean it up so forward it addresses and all, it's a really good chance that someone equally dense along the way is going to post it somewhere, with all of those addresses, and your email is there for any bot to harvest.

Some days email is just a pain in the a**.

SRS

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: John MacKenzie
Date: 05 May 03 - 08:11 AM

I have 2 addys and 1 is only for personal stuff and friends, the other is used for organisations or shopping, or whatever. When I start to get spam on the second one I change it. I just don't see any other way, personally I think that all unsolicited mail should be banned, but it aint going to happen.....Giok

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: Jeri
Date: 05 May 03 - 07:12 AM

I hate the stuff and I get a load of it SENT. In my case, I think I got on one too many mass-mailing lists. Quite a few of the spam messages in which the spammer hasn't hidden recipient names have names of other folkies.

One more thing on the mass mailings & spam, I've been getting worms on a regular basis from several addresses on one particular ISP. I think I'm getting those because of mass-mailings. The worms look for addresses in other e-mails, not just in the infected computer's address book.

FOR PETE'S SAKE, IF YOU SEND MASS MAILINGS, PLEASE HIDE THE RECIPIENT LIST!!!

My ISP filters some spam, I filter some, and some gets through. Happily, it's almost always in HTML. I can read it, but not without difficulty. The filters I have set up are based on words in the message title, sender's address - sometimes this is any domain, and mass mailings. Sometimes I miss an address change or other bit of information I WANT to read with the latter, but most of it's spam. (I can also filter IN any 'From' address, so newsletter thingies sent out by, say, Texas-based performers, get to my in-box.

The best way to prevent spam is, as others have said, to guard your e-mail address. To stop getting it completely once you're in the spam loop, I think you have to change addresses.

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 05 May 03 - 06:32 AM

Jon -

The virus guys love to stick a worm on your machine that makes your machine send a bunch of junk that looks like it came from you. These worms are the basis for the "Denial of Service" (DOS) attacks that have been publicised quite a lot recently. They'll trigger a whole bunch of infected machines to all send to the same address simultaneously (and repeatedly) in hopes of blocking all legitimate communication.

Incidentally, the spammers tend to ignore dot-org addresses, but they do often launch "crawlers" that look for anything that might be an email address, and they love searching chat and message sites. So you may have just given your addys to another spammer or two by posting them above. Some people "disguise" addys if they want to post them by spelling out the "at" and "dot" instead of writing them so they're easily recognized by a machine.

Another annoying trick that's cropped up recently is the use of the "net send" utility that's intended to let your local webmeister broadcast news to users on the local net. It's built into nearly every op system around. It can be accessed from outside if they figure out your URL, and pops up even if you're not connected to the web. It can be disabled with a regedit, but some of them have apparently figured out how to reset/re-enable it.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: fiddler
Date: 05 May 03 - 05:56 AM

Trouble with the email address change is when you have a business email, mine is! It needs to be the same.

It is used legitimately by colleagues and work associates all over UK - sadly none abroad yet.

Its the filtration that is the problem.

You could end up throwing the baby out with the bathwater!

Lots of good Ideas I shall be sifting them through whatn I finish this next bit of database.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: GUEST,Jon
Date: 05 May 03 - 05:36 AM

John, this article may be of interest to you. It seem's spammers are now trying to "hijack" people's computers.

I haven't worked out where most of my spam comes from but most of it goes to an email address, [e-mail] that I hardly ever use for email communication.

Of my other email addresses, [e-mail] and [e-mail] recieve little (say 1 or 2 per week cf. say 15 per day on the freeuk account) even though the latter is the one I give without "anti-spam modification" in newsgroup communication.

I also have "help@" both jonbanjo and folkinfo which are "publicised" on the websites but I have never seen any spam to these accounts. The "help@" accounts are operated by more than one person though so it could be that one of the "admins" has recieved spam that I don't know of.

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 05 May 03 - 01:20 AM

The problem with most recommendations for spam blocking utilities is that you don't know whether the blocker is working for you, or whether the spammers just haven't discovered your address.

Has anyone who was getting a lot of spam blocked it with one of these utilities without also changing their address?

Even hotmail has a fair "filter," and they manage to send about half of the spam to junk mail. The problem is that the spammers fake return addresses, send with multiple different subject lines, and numerous other tricks, just to confuse the filters. It's not uncommon to find what is obviously the same message at least twice in the inbox and five or six times in the junk mail - each with a different "id" and all sent within a few seconds of each other.

It's been mentioned before that you should be particularly cautious about allowing your kids to use "cute" nicknames as an email address. "Cuddlebunny" and "sweetstuff" will invite a particularly obnoxious kind of spam. Just about anybody (sufficiently perverted) can pick out the "currently popular" nicknames kids use, and send at random until they get an answer.

A "strong" address, containing a symbol or two and maybe a couple of numbers can significantly reduce the likelihood that your address will be found by a "random sequence generator." A relatively "long" name may give a little help. If you use numbers, they should not be consecutive: john42 is not nearly as good as j4hn2.

Most sites treat email addys as not "case sensitive," so just mixing upper and lower case won't help much; but if I were to use j0hn_1n_kans2s (3 numerals and one symbol) they at least have to include 26 letters + 10 digits + a half dozen symbols in their "randoms." This raises the number of possible sequences rather significantly, and may prevent, or at least inhibit, them from finding you.

There is some indication that spammers avoid addys that "look like a business," although that's kind of an "iffy" one to rely on.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: Bee-dubya-ell
Date: 05 May 03 - 01:12 AM

I'm gonna say something that a lot of folks probably don't wanna hear.

America Online really does a good job of blocking spam.

I know it's politically incorrect to say anything nice about mega-corporations, but it's true. In the year that I've had AOL I've gotten less than five pieces of email spam. I was getting some of those "instant message" spams for a while, but I've blocked them now (with AOL's help).   

Now, the only people that send me bothersome messages of any kind are AOL themselves with their never-ending "special offers".

Bruce

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: GUEST,Crazy Little Woman
Date: 05 May 03 - 12:42 AM

I use Juno Speedband (14.95 a month), and I never get any spam.

Thanks for the tips about not putting an e-mail address on the web. Good information for everybody.

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: Ebbie
Date: 05 May 03 - 12:20 AM

For $12.00 a year my local server (GCI.Com) isolates incoming spam and virus-suspected emails then notifies me that they've come in. I can do a Select All and Remove 25 of them at a time, which is immeasureably better than having them come onto my front page, good as $10,000 a week working part time, or growing an appendage that I can do without, or recently being offered an Iraq Deck of Cards Fugitive something or another, sounds. :)

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 04 May 03 - 10:52 PM

John Dvorak of Ziff Davis suggested a "solution" that the ISPs could implement. If the ISP acknowledged each email by sending back a "problem" that required a one or two second calculation, and return of a correct answer, before accepting any email, the spammers would be out of business.

First - a fake address wouldn't work, because they'd never receive the "problem," and all their transmissions would be undelivered.

Second - the spammers rely on being able to send several thousand emails per minute - and their return rate is so low that even a second or two for each message would literally sink them.

The delay for anyone sending "normal" traffic would be no worse than the slight delay I get while Norton scans each outgoing message.

This would impose a slight extra message burden on the ISPs, but 80 percent of messages are now SPAM - so doubling the traffic per valid message would still get them a 60 percent gain in capacity - if the SPAM was eliminated.

Any such solution may have hidden faults that need to be examined before implementing, but this one is simple enough to look pretty reasonable. If he can come up with something this simple, certainly the ISPs could too, if they really wanted to.

John

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: GUEST,Ely
Date: 04 May 03 - 09:53 PM

I have a Lycos address and I get some SPAM but I'm not inundated. I got mad, though, when they took away their "block" button. You used to be able to just click on the "check" box by an email and block it without opening it. Now, you have to add the sender's address to a block list, which means you have to open the email (since most SPAM doesn't have the sender address in the "sender" ID field). I liked not having to open SPAM because it helps avoid viruses. I wrote Lycos an angry email demanding my "block" button back but of course they won't do it just for me.

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: NicoleC
Date: 04 May 03 - 08:58 PM

Including Hotmail in any sentence as a solution to spam is highly entertaining. Sign up for a Hotmail account and you'll have 10 spams within 2 hours. (Not MSN's fault, incidentally.)

My solutions:
-Change your email address periodically. Once it becomes compromised, there's not a damn thing you can do until there's an internet equivalent o fht eTelezapper. Trying to use one of these software progams to detech spam before downloading it was, to me, just an elaborate way of deleteing it.

-Never, NEVER enter your email address on a form on the web, post with your real address on usenet, or type your full and accurate email address on any web site, including this one. Come up with creative ways to insert extra characters that are obvious to human brains but problematic for harvesters.

-When you really gotta submit an email address (for example, when they will email you a password before you can continue), use one of the free web mail accounts. Keep one handy, or just make up a new one. If you continue to do business with that web site or later come to trust their use of your email address, you can always correct it later.

-When choosing email addresses, look for unusual domains. Big ones like AOL and Hotmail and Yahoo get shotgunned, and even if they don't have YOUR address, they might randomly generate it.

-Get a well-rounded internet filtering product like Webwasher, which can be set to disable script access to cookies, web bugs and other potential methods of harvesting your email address while you are online without your knowledge.

-In general, stay away from THOSE sites. You know the ones... flashing ads and pop ups everywhere, and 90% advertising.

-Disable HTML email. You may still get the spam, but you won't be triggering malicious HTML code or getting any of those nasty pictures.

-If you have any influence over your IT department, they should really consider subscribing to a filtering blacklist, instead of trying to create their own.

The problem goes beyond email, and even direct marketting associations are supporting anti-spam legislation now. I have little faith in it working. But for every email you do get, legitimate or not, your ISP filtered a spam. At work, we filter over 37,000 emails per day for our 400+ email addresses, yet our users are still deluged. (We're working on satisfying all the requirements to sign up for a good blacklist service.)

My cell phone service keeps trying to get sign up for web serive -- with a Hotmail account. Ha! So I can get spam on my cell phone, too? Spam text messages are coming to a cell phone near you, too.

----------------------
I'm curious to know what parents do. It seems draconian (and cruel to teenage egos) to always go through their email before they can read it, but it's the only way I can think of to be sure your kids aren't getting assaulted with this.

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: bbc
Date: 04 May 03 - 08:40 PM

Oh, no, I have vertical dyslexia! I thought the thread name said Spaw & Porn! I don't mind getting rid of Porn, but I think we should keep Spaw! :)

Back on topic--the only way I have (at least temporarily) gotten rid of spam was by putting my email address on my son's website. He has a .name domain & the spammers don't seem to have discovered them yet!

best,

bbc

Subject: RE: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: Gareth
Date: 04 May 03 - 07:21 PM

Mailwasher, and tight filters on Hotmail !! Or enjoy it !!!!

A funny but true story

Welsh Assembly Election 2003

The Labour Party Candidate in Caerphilly, one Ron Davies, had 'self destructed'.

We had 10 days to find a new candidate, and complete the nomination formalities.

A new Candidate was chosen by individual members vote, and it fell to me to rewrite various leaflets. One thing I was short of before printing was good (ie proffessional) photos of the new candidate, one Jeff Cuthbert, and the deadline was approaching.

No problem - studio in Cardiff - E Mail the JPGs

Checked E Mail - no pictures _- eventually they were sent again.

Just one problem the header was "Here are your Pic's" Yep the Hotmail spam killer had classified them as 'PORN' and delated !!!!!!!

Gareth

Subject: BS: Spam and Porn - how to get rid of it?
From: fiddler
Date: 04 May 03 - 06:20 PM

Thought I'd ask this one 'cos you lot often have good ideas.

I've just checked my University Work Email account and out of the new emails all were porn or spam.

Every time I set my filters to cut them out they just come up with a new address or put '*' in so it doesn't look like p*n*s etc....

Yup this is the IT geek loosing the battle.

I'd even buy software if I could, if it exists!

My other business ISP is better at filtering but I still get some.

Am I odd 'cos I don't like them, I have no desire to see a teenage farmhand misbehaving with her horse!!!

HEELLLPPPP!