My daughter is getting lot of spam emails from companies trading in products to boost male sex activity...?

Question

The child started blocking the addresses but if she blocked three addresses the next day there were three dozen emails on the product with different sender addresses. How do these guys manage get addresses of yahoo email users? How to stop this disgusting interference? Now she is simply deleting doubtful messages without even opening them. Is there any other way? Pl advise.

Answer 1

Once her email address is on a spammers list it is almost impossible to get off. Right now, her e-mail address (along with millions of others) is on a CD being sold from the back rooms of software shops from Bangladesh to Botswanna and from Norway to the Netherlands.

However there are several things that she can do to prevent even more spam.

1. Start by removing her e-mail address from her Yahoo profile, if it is on it. The spam-industry has programs that are continusously crawling the web looking for the "@" symbol which is a sure sign the the word before it and the domain name after it is an e-mail address!

2. Use a longer address. The spam industry uses programs that try sending e-mail to all known domain names. Example: a program might start trying to send out e-mails to everyone starting with [e-mail] and continue down to [e-mail]. Using a longer e-mail address will make this harder to do.

3. Never click the "Unsubscribe Link" in any e-mail. This will only confirm to the spammers that your e-mail address is indeed real and that you are reading their garbage. In fact, do not even open any e-mail from anybody you don't know or trust. Many spams are not only annoying but contain viruses of other malware. Just delete 'em without opening 'em!.
You can however click that "Unsubscribe Me" button from businesses that are well known and that you trust. Walmart... yes. Someone selling Viagra...no.

4. Open up a second e-mail account. Whenever, a website requires you to register using your e mail address, use this secondary address. There are many unscrupulous websites that will sell her address to others or bombard you with spam themselves.

5. Download a free copy of SiteAdvisor. SiteAdvisor will alert her when she searchs (Google, Yahoo, MSN, search only) of websites that are known to send out spam. This can help her avoid registering with any sites that are known to spam people.
http://www.siteadvisor.com/

She must treat her e-mail address just like she would her telephone number or home address....only give it out to those that you absolutely trust!

Good luck to you both.

Answer 2

They usually get e-mails when you enter it in some form (doesn't have to be a porn site - could be any offer, get a free $500 gift card at Wal-Mart (Wal-Mart not really involved), etc) Use AddressGaurd to protect against that, also don't give out your address much. Once they have an address, they will share it and send all kinds of spam. They will have fake sender address each time. Marking them Spam should train your filter to avoid them. A better e-mail filter that compares the messages and figures if you got 3 dozen nearly identical they must be spam would be good. Maybe Google has that. There are also "white list" filters that only allow known good senders in.

Answer 3

I got this problem too: on one of my mail addresses I get all kind of commecials without ever asking for them. And it wasn't an "Yahoo!" mail address. I couldn'd solve the problem, so I don't use that E-mail address any more. You can't block the sender, because the sender is always different...
So I set up another E-mail address and I asked all my friends to send their messages to that address.
You can advice your daughter to do the same, but make sure your daughter doesn't ask her friends to send their messages to another address by sending them a mail from the old address, just like a precaution.

Answer 4

Junk email is a common problem and most providers have email filtering available. Unfortunately, there is no straight forward, automatic, fool-proof solution.

Since you use yahoo mail, the best you can do is to "select" all junk e-mails and click on "Spam" link. This will permanently mark the senders for Spam. Also, Yahoo email has automatic filtering to the bulk folder (which does not seem to work for you).

Gmail filtering is supposed to be very good.

Answer 5

I haven't gotten anything that led me to believe the spam I have gotten is for male products, but since I don't usually read them I can't say for sure. Most of mine are for cars & free stuff that you have to buy things to get the free stuff. I have been getting a lot more though. I mark them as spam and they come back. I finally found a lot of the spam has a unsubscribe thing on them (I didn't subscribe in the 1st place), but it seems to work so far because the ones I have unsubcribed to have gone away. You may want to try that.

Answer 6

Your daughter may need to create a new email account.

I use Gmail and I love the spam filter built in.

Let me know if you want an invitation to gmail.

Good luck!

Answer 7

Are you noticing similar domain names? Some e-mail providers will let you block all e-mail from specific domains. I used to get a lot of those, but I'm a grown woman, so it just seemed ridiculous to me. It's different for a child.

Answer 8

create a new account. there's really nothing you can do but to delete the messages. also, make sure she doesn't sign up or register her email address at any web site.

Answer 9

when your daughter gives her email on wide chat rooms then that causes the emails coming.... better change her address and keep it more private...

Answer 10

It seemed like they started for us, when my son became a teenager. I assume one look at a website about even something innocent like "cute girls", starts the whole sex spam thing.