Email Spam
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Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, so went the Monty python song. And equally annoying are the unsolicited e-mails that are sent to your inbox offering you everything from a cut of a family fortune secretly stashed away by a now deceased Nigerian Army Major to little pills to increase your girth! But there is a serious side. Spam is estimated to account for up to 40% of global e-mail and by July 2003 spam will account for more e-mail traffic than legitimate mail. The government is determined to crack down on unsolicited e-mail. It is proposing a fight back against the spammers with strict new rules about how personal e-mail details are used. From October, a European Union directive will make unsolicited e-mails illegal across member states and the UK Government is planning to have its legal framework in place at the same time. But what can the every day punter do?

Courtesy of BBC Radio 4. Material World.
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According to our BBC science program today, apparently 40% of all the E-Mail circulating the world is spam mail, generated by 150 people living in Florida.
A European Directive coming soon to prohibit un-solicited spam mail will have little or no effect, because most of the spam is generated in the U.S where the "Freedom Of Speech Act*" prohibits the use of "Spam Blockers", (they are actually illegal in the U.S. for that very reason)....the mind boggles...!
The spammers whole life is dedicated to finding us with Hi-Tech search engines, and our attempt to stop them is of little, or no avail.
Practically all of my spam mail refers U.S. Dollars which indicates the country of origin.
It is estimated that things are going to get worse.

Cheers...
Paul.
(England).

*Thank-you very much Florida, I'm really looking forward to getting another dozen Viagra adverts in my E-Mail tonight and watching all the little Emmy-Lou's in Texas, via their bedroom web-cams. I just have difficulties in finding any U.S. Dollars in my English purse....!

I don't get a lot of Spam but my parents do. It's mainly over their company's fax machine. Fax spam is the worst because it wastes YOUR resorces and not the advertising company. Saturday alone, 6 ads came over the fax offering everything from cheap trips to low cost laser printer refills, which we'll be needing because of their ads.

My privacy settings are so high cookies etc are blocked left,right and centre. When I do get ads they are just blank pages. When friends mail I only get who sent it!
They ring me but can't get through cos I'm on the net.
So they come around to see me IN PERSON!! Then I tell them to p*ss off cos I paid for the connection and I don't want to waste my net time or the connection fee to get back on!

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What you do to remedy that problem is take some paper with anything printed on it, tape it into a loop and fax it back to the spammer

well,for all of us in the USA,we have something called "freedom of speech" which means we can crap all over whoever is sending us these emails.well im gonna experiment around the spam im getting and see what the F**k can i do to  piss off whateva is sending me dis crap(maybe ill reply to a comp and it will go crazy and crash-never sending spam ever again!)lmao

i use to try to mail bomb the spammers. . .didn't work very well, alot of the emails were from fake accounts. . .i just delete them now, alot quicker than mail bombing

I don't get any Spam on my 'main' account, which is this one. Simply because I have never visited another site while in this account.
It's a stupid and inconvenient precaution but it does mean that the only email I get is from SimV or related to my business.
(Thank You Pete, for not sharing our email details with these wretches!).

I do have a couple of other accounts that are completely full of crap every time I open them (I get the "septic tank" advice every day........lol).

I don't mind admitting that, when I was first connected to the Net, I had a look at some 'Adult' sites just to see what all the fuss was about (you see I'm human too......lol) but that was the biggest mistake I ever made. I got so much unsolicitored offers the next day that I had to close the account. I got everything from marriage proposals from 'beautiful 18 year old nymphomaniacs' to offers to see what some bloke had that I didn't?? That was just from reading the subject quotes!

The only way I know for sure to stop it is to never start it, like I said, don't use your main email account to 'surf'. Use another one that you know will have no email on it that is intened for you, just crap that you can delete in one stroke.  

The Mrs has a couple of accounts too. She uses one for her Uni research, which is consequently full of crap every time she opens up. The one she uses as her 'contact' account for friends, family and 'worthwhile' things is never used to access a site on the Net.