spam in Gmail

ball ox

my gmail a/c is being flooded with spam linking to porn and illegal sites. Gmail puts it all in a spam box but im wondering if there is a way I can just stop getting it, some of the subject lines just make me feel sick and want to kill the guy who is sending them to me. Getting about 20 a day, all from different addresses. Thing is, I dont visit porn/gambling/rubbish sites at all let alone give my email address out to psychos, I dunno how the hell they got my address. Is there anything I can do?

Static M.e.

They can get your email from any site where you posted your email address, they have scripts just trawling the net looking for them which are also smart enough to figure out gaps in your email address like My name @ gmail dot com
etc.

No nothing you can do, never answer, or reply to any of the mails.

Ruu_Old

The spam in my gmail rarely gets to the inbox (into the Spam box) but I get a fair amount of it everyday, not much that can be done.

realblackstuff

Since you get so many free 'Invites' with your Gmail account, just invite yourself on a non-gmail account to create a new Gmail-account. If you are careful to whom you give it, you should not get (m)any spams. Then let the old account continue, and clean it up maybe once a week.

r3nu4l

I only started getting spam in my gmail account about two weeks ago and the only reason I'm getting spam is because I forgot what I was doing one day and used my regular gmail address in a form field instead of my 'other gmail address'.

As realblackstuff said, set up a new account and tell all your friends, then use your old one when filling in online forms.

Out of interest how many spam messages are people getting per day? I'm getting about 25 on average, which isn't all that bad. It rarely gets to my inbox.

Strangely, most of it so far doesn't contain links, but I guess if I reply to even one, I'll get hundreds once they realise the account is active.

Martyr

Out of interest how many spam messages are people getting per day? I'm getting about 25 on average, which isn't all that bad. It rarely gets to my inbox.

i get about 25-30 a day.
what i noticed is, spam with chinese character encoding, gets into inbox.

r3nu4l

Strangely enough the amount of spam coming into my hotmail account has diminshed vastly since I began using the 'report as spam' function. Looks like Microsoft are becoming effective against spam :eek: (or is that just my experience). I now only get 3 or so a day compared with the 40-50 a day I used to get.

Must look at the next spam that makes my gmail inbox and see what differentiates it from the rest.

realblackstuff

I get between 70-130 spam's a day in my "unimportant, for online-use" Gmail, mostly from the USA. None of it is for porn or 'male' medicine though. It is extremely rare that one lands in my Inbox.
My other Gmail accounts rarely attract spam at all.

I've had my main utvinternet.com account since 1999, that was always 'clean'.
Someone somewhere recently must have become affected by a virus/trojan that stole their email addresses incl. mine, and since a few weeks I'm getting inundated with Barclays Bank and Cialis/Viagra spam, to the tune of 20-30 per HOUR!
My Thunderbird junk-filters work very well and my inbox mostly stays clean, but it looks like I have to get a new main-email account.
I HATE spam.

gerky

I had a gmail account that I hadnt used yet that started getting a lot of spam, so I guessed that the persons pc I got the invite of must be infected turns out it wasnt, so I did a good bit of reading and found out that some spammers now use programs that automatically guess addresses just by putting different words together so the best thing to do is to pick a address thats hard to guess like mix irish and english and stay away from real words

cwynnes

In fairness to msn they really have cleaned up their act with spam, i too get only 2 or 3 a day in msn, ive started getting a lot more spam on yahoo than i used to, i get at least 10 a day compared to a few weeks ago i didnt get any, gmail have always been outta control with spam, i dont think theres anything you can do with the gmail spam, just be thankful very litte makes it to the inbox, i just let the spam build, i couldnt be bothered try delete it

gerky

Gmail has a filter if you want to use it

angel2

angel2 wrote:

I had a gmail account that I hadnt used yet that started getting a lot of spam,

some spammers just throw a dictionary or random word generator at the mail server before the @ in yahoo (or whatever) I mainly get the "pump-n-dump) stock invites about 10-15 a day.:mad: