What do YOU do with SCAM/SPAM e-mails?

[LONDONER]

I know that some people just delete them and some, non tech savvy people, fall for the SCAMS and end up by losing a lot of money.

Personally I take a slightly different approach. I report them whenever possible.
First of all I open up the e-mail headers to see where it’s come from or where one is supposed to reply. If for instance it is a simple one like Outlook, I just forward the e-mail complete with e-mail headers to [email protected]. I report it something ike this:

The e-mail below from [email protected] is SPAM. Please take appropriate action

In this sense Microsoft is very good because they always reply. Something like this:

Hello,
We have taken appropriate action on the account that you reported in compliance with the Hotmail Code of Conduct (COC). To view our Terms of Use, visit the following Web site:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windo...of-conduct
Sincerely,
Marian
Online Safety Team

If it’s from Yahoo then the same applies, I send it to [email protected] although they never reply. Gmail is different and you have to report it here:

https://support.google.com/mail/contact/...hl=en&rd=1

Then there are some that you may not recognise, in which case I try to trace them using this site: http://abuse.net/lookup.phtml. This was I was able to forward an offending mail to verio.com and another to vtx.ch

You’ll be surprised how many belong to well known servers. live.com and careceo.com belongs to Microsoft, ymail.com belongs to Yahoo and Gmail has several.

Some might think that I am wasting my time but I am causing a lot of problems for some scammers and spammers when they find their e-mail accounts have been deleted and I hope that I am saving some people from falling in to their traps. When I find that no action has been taken I will go further and write to the CEO of a Company. I have written to Tim Armstrong the CEO of AOL and got a reply from their legal department because they said that muslim.com does not belong to AOL. It used to but now belongs to gmx.com. I have also written to Marissa Meyer, the CEO of Yahoo.

Anyone who wants to get in touch with a CEO of any company, just ask me in private please.

It's my little effort to help on-line security

[Kiid]

I ignore most of my emails unless I get super board. Then I reply to them and tell them I don't own a car when they ask if I care about what I put in my car u.u

[Bowyn Aerrow]

Most of my spam goes into the spam folder and I never see it again. I do occasionally check the spam folder to see what is going in there.

I don't get much in the way of spam in most of my email accounts: One for my business, one for signing up for forums/personal/private contacts and one for 'fun and games and doing other stuff on the net.

That last one gets lots and lots and lots of junk mail. I suspect a lot of these websites just sell your data to other websites and thus the shit storm of junk mail rains down.

[LONDONER]

The amount of SCAM and SPAM that you receive depends on your e-mail address. For instance my main Gmail account get a lot because my address was created for me by my IT expert years ago and comprised my first name dot last name. That's incredibly easy for a scammer or spammer to find out. I have other Gmail accounts that I created myself and they are somewhat more complex. The more complex your address the more difficult it is for a scammer of spammer to guess it. For instance, it could be something like:

%dogwithwetnose@Gmail

[Chas]

They go straight into my spam box, I do nothing other then click "delete all spam emails" or whatever it says in Gmail.

[Pix]

Plenty of the email addresses are spoofed. That is "tenger_group" in your example might not actually be guilty.

But as a tip for anyone who is being spoofed like that...that happened to me once (I knew because that box kept getting a lot of "undeliverable" alerts for spam) I tried everything and couldn't get it to stop so I finally closed the account. But as it was hotmail I had 9 months to bring it back up (but it wouldn't work in the meantime, and I tested by trying to email it from another account which got returned to me). After a couple of weeks I brought it back up and the spoofing had stopped.

[Pix]

Btw, when a phone spammer from India kept calling up, even after I explained I knew all about his scam (though it was obvious his English sucked, but I was supposed to believe he worked for Microsoft, even if he had successfully spoofed their number on my caller ID), I changed tactics and said, "My computer is upstairs, let me go boot it up." Then I'd leave it off the hook and go about my day. I figured I was costing HIM time & money that way instead of the reverse, and maybe even saving some poor fool out there from himself.

I was worried that the kids might pick it up (or even answer) and try to be "grown up" by "taking care of it" themselves, so I explained all about scammers, particularly the one calling up at the moment (and what NOT to do), and why I was leaving the phone off the hook. I did say that if they needed the phone for any reason, even just to be sure someone could call (the other females in the house have their own cell phone thankfully that they prefer), then hang up. Don't apologize or say anything, simply hang up. While I repeated what I said about respectful behavior, I said scam artists didn't deserve the least bit of respect and had my permission to be as rude as they wanted. I did wonder if I made a mistake doing that when the 9-year-old boy then took mad delight in tormenting the Indian scammer with juvenile fart jokes (like, "Hello..wait, I got to fart....uuuuh, FFFFFFF! You don't want to smell this, whewee. Ok, what? Wait, another...") and the like (I did tell him I better not catch him doing that to anyone other than a phone scammer) but it did seem to finally get the message across to the spammer to take our number off his sucker list.

[Tim18]

It goes to the spam box and it gets deleted that is pretty much what happens to it.

[MisterTinkles]

I click the "spam" button on my email when I get them. After that, they go directly to my spam folder for eradication.

I dont ever open them, because a lot of them carry computer viruses, and if I open them, they activate my internet security program and it tells me to get off that site, that there is an attempt by an infectious virus, and to shut down and restart.

The first computer I ever had I lost to a virus from spam emails. I didnt know I had to have a protection program on my pc. But now I have a really good one.

If my email gets hacked by too many spammers, then I delete it and create a new one.

I have several email accounts for different reasons.....friends, business, regular emails, employment searching, legal/govt stuff, and one for when I place ads in the online papers for stuff for sale or something.

This way I dont have all of my emails in one single email address. So if one gets so bad the spam filter cant handle it, I just delete that email address and start a new one.

[LONDONER]

Thank you all for your interesting replies. While just deleting SPAM is very easy as I explained in my first post, my idea is to stop them scamming/spammig by reporting them to the domian they use. As you saw in the case of Hotmail. it really does work. As far as the others are concened I just hope that it works as I never receive any confirmation from them. It'sd my own personal war aainst this type of e-mail.