Tired of Junk Mail

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The last time I cleaned out my junk emails, I had 107 emails that were pure crap. MetLife, FreeScore360, AT&T, Sexual Predator Alerts, crappy iBooks that hacked my IE the last time I opened it on my PC instead of my iPod, Oil Change coupons (from no known vendor) (I don't even own a car but do look up car related stuff due to a special interest [mostly Pixar related stuff]). Gaaaaaah... I am sick and tired of spam! I have Gmail, and I do like the features, I don't like the fact that I have to keep cleaning out my junk box.

Do I have spyware or something that MBAM and McAfee aren't picking up, or what the crap is it? I know I have a lot of trouble with tracking cookies, even though I set it to "Do Not Track." I have HitmanPro clean out my tracking cookies every time I start the computer (that's all it can do on free and we're currently on an EXTREMELY tight budget! Can't afford luxuries like a subscription to HitmanPro or MBAM!).

I actually have six Gmail accounts and my main one is the only one that gets junk. I'm almost wondering if I should just close it and start over. What do you guys think?

I have an account that I purely use for whenever a website wants my email address. That account naturally gets lots of junk mail - which does not bother me in the least, as the junk mail goes straight into the junkmail folder, and from there it gets automatically deleted after 30 days. Why do you have to clean out your junk folder? I just leave mine for automatic deletion.

I also use Firefox in Privacy mode as my web browser, so cookies are not kept after I close it.

Whether you want to start over or not would probably depend on how much work it would create for you, e.g. notifying all your contacts and change it wherever it is listed as your contact address. The new account will not be immune to junk either, so not sure that I would bother.

I hardly get any junk email. The main reason is I use several accounts, one for friends & family, another for banks and tax stuff, another for responding to enquiries from members of the public, another for internet forums and so on. When the public email address starts attracting too much spam I abandon it and open a new one. Once the spammers start heavily spamming an account there is no going back, they will sell on your email address to other spammers.

+1

This is the standing rule for a lot of people. Have more than one e-mail account. One is for the IMPORTANT stuff that matters and is only given out to trusted people. Others are used for more common things (e.g., shopping online). Another could be used for stuff that likely will get SPAM or sold to SPAMMERS.

It also helps to use the "junk mail" flag if you get your e-mail online. It lets the service know it's unwanted, automatically sends future e-mails from that sender to the Spam/Junk folder, and eventually wrangles your account back into your control.

I really cleaned out one account that was getting tons of spam with simple filtering.

The rules work something like this:

1) All local e-mail from the same domain or sent from the same /24 block are permitted.
2) A whitelist is checked for permitted senders.
3) Any address of the form eric76+extra@example.com addresses. That is, on some e-mail servers, if eric76@example.com is a valid address, then so is eric76+foo@example.com where foo contains a wide variety of characters in a string. The e-mail is delivered as if it were addressed to eric76@example.com.
4) Any e-mail encrypted using using my public PGP key is permitted.
5) Any e-mail signed by the senders PGP key and with their matching public PGP key available on the various PGP keyservers is permitted.

So if an incoming e-mail satisfied at least one of those five rules, then it was accepted. For a while, a message was returned to the sender instructing them to resend the message after encrypting it with my public PGP key. Nobody ever did that.

People don't like jumping through hurdles. Someone emailed me once for some minor help with one of my software products. I sent an email reply but it bounced back saying I had to go somewhere and enter some captcha code first. F*ck that!

I've also received various emails over the years asking for support and the return email address wasn't valid! A similar problem with requests posted via the contact form on my website where people mess up their email address - I can usually guess that they don't mean .cam but .com instead, sort of thing.

What I hate more than spam though is losing emails through false positives. I've ensured that all email sent to my own domain reaches me - I had to turn off something called spamguard (or similar) as implemented by my hosting company.

I've had similar problems with other people getting false positives... when they buy a software licence off me I email a licence code to them. On occasion it ends up in their spam folder. There was even a few years ago now that Gmail was extremely aggressive and it simply deleted such emails, not even putting them in the recipients spam folder! That became a farce - several customers emailed me to complain they hadn't got their licence code but my attempts to reply to them were also eaten by Gmail! I ended up having to contact them using a Yahoo webmail account. Thankfully after a few weeks Google turned off this overly aggressive spam filtering after having received lots of complaints from its users.

Some of the junk makes it into my inbox, though, like iBooks. I opened it and then Firefox (not IE) got alerted by HitmanPro.Alert that it had an intruder every time I opened it (I've been looking out for attacks like these with HitmanPro.Alert ever since a bad run with Conduit.A.).

I think I'll use TallyMan's advice and make multiple primary accounts and retire the old one. My other accounts have no junk at all! (They're also reserved for special purposes so I can't use any of them for my primary accounts.)

On that particular account, I quit using it for normal e-mail years ago. Since it is listed as my contact address on an official list, I feel compelled to keep it open. Every once in a while, I get a request for documentation.

On my web page, I provide an e-mail address along with a notice that it may be discontinued at any time. That e-mail address is an alias for my usual address. Whenever someone sends a legitimate e-mail, I reply using my normal e-mail address so that if they save that, they will have the normal e-mail address in their address book. When I start to receive spam at the temporary e-mail address, I set up a new alias, change the address on the web page to the new alias, and remove the old alias. That seems to work pretty well.