Why Am I Suddenly Getting Spam?

Question

I have my laptop for 6 months now, and I have never received a single piece of spam, which was great.
Then on Tuesday the first piece of spam arrived, and now, today, the second mail has arrived.
Why should this start happening out of nowhere, and without warning?
How can I stop it?
I use Outlook Express, and I have Norton Antivirus installed.
Any comments welcome.
Thanks.

Answer 1

If you have signed up for anything spam will come. Also, if you do online surveys they will overflow your mail. Just mark them as spam and your problem will be solved.

Answer 2

First NEVER open one, and NEVER NEVER NEVER click "remove me from your list".
If you are lucky, they don't know you are there, so it may stop.
There are two types of spam;
1) Looking for active accounts.
There are server farms out there generating THOUSANDS ov emails a day, not knowing if there is a corresponding email account or not. So (for example) if they find that there is an new mail server called nospam.com, they will start with
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
..
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
(you get the picture).
They might also try things like
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
[e-mail]
OK?
These mails will almost always return an acknowledgement as soon as you open them, and then they KNOW that this is an active account and sell it to the other type of spammer.
2) Trying to sell you something

Another way they might have found you is with some kind of worm, which might even have been an advert on a web site, which you did NOT click on!
It may also be that if you signed up for something legit, like eBay, (which I know for a fact attracts spam!!!) someone picked your email address from there.

MAYBE if you just delete them, it will stop. MAYBE.
Get AVG Free, (if you don't already have it). It may help to eliminate them.

If not, sorry, but you just joined the rest of us!
Why Bill Gates, and Cysco systems won't do something about it I do not know, because it is SUCH a waste of life!

Answer 3

How do you stop spam ? You don't. Once you sign in to a web site online, your e-mail address will be sold, traded, ect with many other web sites. I get at least 100+ spam messages a day. All you can do is delete them. NEVER open a message from someone you don't know. If a friend of yours has your e-mail address in their address book, there's malware programs that can steal them. BTW, Norton is only an anti-virus program, and I think it sucks. Welcome to the real world. Soon you'll be getting tons of spam. Just delete them.

Answer 4

I would ask the following:

How many humorous emails do you forward?
How many of those do your friends forward?

Your email address is probably on every one of those!

Spam is something we have to live with to a certain extent. One way round it is to have more than one email address. Another is to NEVER EVER forward something to somebody else that it is likely that they, too, will forward. If you want to do this, then

1) make a new email address just for that.
2) NEVER use the Reply to All button and NEVER Forward as an Attachment.
3) If you want to send something on, send it to a spurious address (I use [e-mail]) and put your adressees in the Bcc: box, not in the To: or Cc: boxes. Your correspondents will only see your address and theirs - nobody elses.

One a day is not bad ... I get about 60 a day (which all go into my Junk Mail folder automatically). Now and again I check them out (without opening them). If they are not addressed to one of my valid email addressed, they get deleted.

Answer 5

Unfortunately spam is not a virus. So Norton anti-virus wouldn't work.

What i recommend is using yahoo anti-spy which you can get if you install their toolbar on your browser. It's pretty good and i have am very satisfied with it. Plus its free.

Another reason you might be getting spam is... you probably went to a website and gave your personal info. There is unfortunately no cure once these unethical marketing people get a hold of your data. They will just send you and send you all sorts of offers whether you are interested or not on the hope that you will eventually accept their offer.

It's a bit of a bummer

Good luck on fixing it

Answer 6

Alas you have joined the real world, a word of caution, some times spamers stick a link saying something like " If you wish to be removed from our list click here" DON'T all your doing is telling the swine they have found a live address. As all my colleagues above have said just delete or mark them as spam, sorry I don't use Outlook so I don't know.

Answer 7

Sometimes when you buy from different online stores or sign up for offers, the company starts sending you spam from sponsor companies. If you really hate this, get McAfee. It comes with SpamKiller which works great. Or, just get two emails, use this one for signing up for things, and make a new one for friends and stuff.

Answer 8

you aren't to any extent further the only one. in accordance to the anti-unsolicited mail specialists, we are seeing far extra unsolicited mail mails now than ever before. And the spammers have become extra sensible about getting previous the unsolicited mail filters. that is why extra unsolicited mail is making it to the Inbox instead of going immediately to the majority/unsolicited mail folder, and why a number of your good mails are ending up interior the majority/unsolicited mail folder. There are some staple products we may be able to all do to maintain unsolicited mail to a minimum... a million. unsolicited mail mails that bypass immediately to Bulk/unsolicited mail must be left there, unopened. you could empty that folder any time you go with, yet under no circumstances under no circumstances open unsolicited mail mails. do not attempt to unsubscribe from some thing and do not click any hyperlinks in those mails. 2. unsolicited mail mails that land on your Inbox must be marked as unsolicited mail so that they are moved to the majority/unsolicited mail folder and positioned on the Blocked record. (blockading an manage prevents mails from being received from that manage again interior the destiny.) 3. Any e mail that you're the least bit suspicious about must be deleted in the present day. do not enable interest get the further proper of you. only beginning a unsolicited mail e mail out of interest ought to alert the spammers that you've an energetic e mail manage (they probably did not comprehend it before), to which they'll positively deliver a lot of unsolicited mail mail interior the destiny.

Answer 9

Spam is unavoidable. I've even had people disguise themselves as my e-mail before for sending spam! >_< Well, it's random addresses spammers select, and they send the spam mail. So, spam always comes. Eventually.

Answer 10

you gave your email to the wrong place, they sold it to spammers,
it happened to me years ago, i get from 200-300 spam messages a day. Yahoo passes most to junk mail. A few get through, but thunder bird intelligent email software takes care on nearly all of those