How do I permanently block spammers?

JSteven

New Email
I have an issue that is slowly becoming increasingly more problematic.
It is now at the point where it's getting out of control and I'm seriously considering closing my Hotmail account as a result. The issue is the increasing number of spam emails I get on a daily basis. I have been sending them to the junk folder and now to the phishing folder but it hasn't stopped the amount or frequency of daily spams.

I did a quick check via my account and the best possible resolution I could find was to somehow re-enter each individual spam address to designate it as spam in the hopes of blocking it. However, there are so many that it would be far too time consuming to do this, not to mention I've noticed individual spammers will use several addresses.

I would like to know if there is a way to assign spam emails to a folder or designation and all identical or even similar emails are either blocked or sent to a spam folder for easy deletion.

Thank you for you assistance and would greatly appreciate a quick resolution.

J. Steven
 

foggy

Valued Member
Hi, J.

Welcome !

This may not be a very helpful answer (others may have better ones), but if you're getting so much spam that it actually outweighs your "ham" (good) email, you might consider blacklisting every address except those of your contacts (at least as a temporary measure).

Go to Options > More Options > (Preventing Junk Mail) Filters and Reporting. You can change the junk mail filter setting from "standard" to "exclusive." As noted there, it will send ALL email to the junk folder except those from your contacts and from the Hotmail team. You just need to be sure all your recipients & contacts are, in fact, in your address book.

As an added measure (maybe it's overkill), you can also go to (Preventing Junk Mail) Safe and Blocked Senders and put in (one by one) the people in your address book.

If this "exclusive" setting is not an option for you -- because of having too many contacts to work with or having too many good emails coming to you that aren't from contacts -- then I'm not sure what to suggest. As I say, others here may have ideas.

FWIW, I still find Hotmail to be the biggest "spam magnet" among my email accounts (which is why I don't use it for anything except testing). E.g. two days after signing up for a new Hotmail account I had received more spam that I had for the lifetime of my other accounts combined ! And I hadn't even given out the email address to anyone !! :rolleyes:

Oh... last minute thought: as an alternative you could always sign up for an account with another provider (say, Gmail) and have it POP the Hotmail account. Gmail's spam filters are surely better than Hotmail's and might give you some relief in that regard. In this case, you'd just let all email go to your Hotmail inbox and let Gmail's filters do the work.

You can even set Gmail up to send mail through Hotmail's servers. (And if you keep the Gmail address secret from everyone, have a good, long password, and set up two-factor authentication, you'd have a fairly secure and (hopefully) more spam-efficient set-up.) :)
 

JSteven

New Email
Foggy,

Thanks for in-depth response, I really appreciate it. I was hoping the hotmail help desk would have a quick sensible resolution. I will however take a look at your suggestions, i agree with your asessment regarding hotmail and spam....
I recently put an ad on craigslist to sell an item and there too I was overwhelmed with spam. I do like the Gmail solution and will certainly look at that option, although Im not sure what the definition of "Pop" is, at the moment it may be a good alternative.

Thanks again
 

foggy

Valued Member
POP is "Post Office Protocol." It's simply the term used for account A fetching email from account B (like going to a post office to pick up your mail). You can even set things up so that account A deletes the email from account B when it retrieves it (saving you the trouble of going to account B and deleting it manually). Or you can have account A fetch email from account B without deleting (in case you'd like to move the good mail to account B's storage folder so that you can have a 'back up' copy there).

(Btw, there is another protocol, IMAP, which is more sophisticated and is preferred by most people with desktop email clients (like Outlook, Thunderbird). But that's not something Gmail has for fetching email from other accounts anyway. Gmail just POPs other accounts.)

In any case, there are really only two simple ways to get your email from Hotmail to Gmail: 1) having Hotmail forward all incoming mail to Gmail or 2) having Gmail POP (fetch) email from Hotmail.

In general, forwarding is quicker because it happens right away when an email is delivered. So emails would come to your Gmail account almost as quickly as they come to your Hotmail account. POP, on the other hand, retrieves email from other accounts only at certain intervals. In Gmail's case, I believe every hour or so. There are pros and cons of each way.

In my case, I even went a step further: I have a Gmail account with a long, alphanumeric username, a loooonnngg password and have their 2-Factor Authentication enabled. I then set Gmail up to POP my other accounts and set Gmail up to send email from those other accounts and through those other accounts (these options are shown when setting up these accounts in Gmail's preferences).

No one knows my Gmail address/username because I use it for nothing other than logging in to Gmail, which adds a measure of security. I can read, organize, save, compose and send email from Gmail without ever using/revealing my Gmail address. And if no one knows that account username, it's (hopefully) that much harder for a would-be hacker to break in. :D
 

THERESA

Customer Service
It won't help you with hotmail, but I use SPAMfighter and it works awesome! I was starting to have a huge problem with spam. My email address must have gotten into the wrong hands (like yours) and it exploded. I was getting TONS of spam a day to my thunderbird. I downloaded SPAMfighter and it takes care of 99% of it. Once in awhile one or two slip through but I just mark them and then they are blocked after that.

There are two downsides for me so far, there is a HUGE advertisement on every email I send out which I knew nothing about until I BCC'd myself in on an email and saw it. I wasn't happy about it. It's not small. (screenshot provided-you need to click on it to see how big it is) There is no option to remove it either. I was mad because I wouldn't have had a clue had I not BCC'd myself on that one email that day. I think that's pretty sheisty.

Spamfighter ad.jpg


The second problem I ran into was the fact that it wasn't compatible with the new thunderbird update to 17.0.2. I updated my thunderbird and lost my SPAMfighter. I had to go back and download the previous version for it to work again. I am still waiting for a compatible version of the newer version of thunderbird.
 

kevi

Blacklisted
You can not completely stop all spam, but you can help to put a big dent in it.
First, try not to open any of them, that only makes them send more and more to you.
Check mark them and click on 'Spam,' this should stop those addresses from being delivered to your inbox.
Use your spam filter and block address.
Look for the 'Options' link at upper right corner of mail screen and click on it

Options/ mail options / spam preferences
make sure spam guard is on, click on save changes

Options /mail options / blocked addresses
Enter the E-mail address you wish blocked and click on 'add block'
you will never get mail from that address again.
This should help you to control your spam.
Other tips:
Never open E-mail unless you are absolutely sure who it is from.
Never give out your personal information to anyone.
If at a website and you must sign up for something, check the entire page to make sure you unchecked any lines wanting to send you notices, info, or ads.
Hope this helps.
 
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