Junk email question ......

You can tell a little bit about where a spam email is coming from by reading the mail header. Most email clients suppress this information, but there is almost always a way to turn the headers on. The headers will show the real path to the sender. Note that the spammers are clever enough to garble this information as well, either by using bogus DNS names (IP addresses can't be disguised), or by making it look like they merely relayed the message from another site.

There's a lot of information on this topic out on the web. The link below describes how this all works in excruciating detail.

• Reading spam email headers

Don't open those messages, don't even view them in the preview pane. By opening them, many have a small amount of html code that once the message is opened, its run, and reports back to a malicious web site that the message was opened, and confirms its a good address to send to. This code doesn't generate any on screen activity, so it all happens in the background, completely un-noticed by you. If you do happen to catch it (I did once using the log in my router), and go to the web site, you're computer instantly gets infected with trojans and viruses, and other nasty things that can be a real pain to remove.

This includes the preview pane that is usually on by default in outlook and outlook express. Turn that off.

Think twice about who you give your email address to, and where you post it. Places like yahoo groups, and public message boards can be good places for spammers to harvest email addresses.

Check with your internet provider, they may have free tools available to there customers to help filter and manage spam. I'm not sure about outlook express, but the full version of outlook has a junk mail filter that works pretty well.

There have been discussions of changing that, but I'd expect it to take (another) decade.

Bill

Spammers apparently use a database of names and subjects to make their spam look like personal messages to outfox the spam filters that the ISP's use.

Your email address may be on someone's marketing list. That list may have been sold and/or traded around.

Some companies may respect the email accounts on their lists - some may abuse them to the absolute maximum.

Depending on who has your account, sometimes using the opt-out link at the bottom will help get you off their list. OR if they are unscrupulous, THEN they just know your account is really "live" and they bump you up to the "gold list" to sell to the next guy down the street and it just makes it worse.

A lot of spam is generated by guessing. Spammers might have a "dictionary" of 200,000 common names and then a list of domains (@hotmail.com, @gmail.com, @sbcglobal.net), etc, and just pair all names to all domains... So it may be nothing you've done, or can control whatsoever.

Some email may be generated to you from an acquaintance's virus infected PC - but this seems to be lessening somewhat.

It doesn't help that so many people send jokes, petitions, boycotts against oil companies, etc, to everyone in their address book AND leave everyone's address visible to everyone else. That can allow "harvesting" of accounts to add to the mix.

I have a main email account I use for "real" and a fake one that I never check that I use for signing up for website access (like newspapers, for example) or for giving to salesman that I don't care to hear from again. That helps.

I maintain the email accounts for a domain and created a new account a few weeks ago that we wound up not using. I didn't tell anyone about it and no one ever used it. I happened to notice some time after that, that the account had already started getting spam!

Most email providers these days are trying to keep it as clean as possible. The commercial filters for straining email can be very expensive. Hence, huge providers like hotmail, gmail, etc, can more thoroughly protect their accounts, so you might have better luck creating an account with one of them...

Howard