h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm annoyed

It seems that the GMail account I have in my real name has attracted the attentions of some porn spammers. For the last week I've been clearing about 40 messages a day from the spam box. And I'm not happy about it.

The bit that I don't understand is how they've got this address. I use it to communicate with family and work and, you know, proper stuff. I've never used it to sign up to random sites where you get the feeling they might sell your address onwards. For those sites I'd either set up a new GMail account or use a Mailinator one.

I wanted to have my real name account pristine, and now it's not



The greydesk account which I am much more fast and loose about giving out - friends have it, the BBC has it, h2g2 has it, Yahoo and MSN have it, some poker and gambling websites have it - remains totally spam free.

Bummer.

It's possible they *haven't* got your address as such, if it's in your real name. It's not unheard of for spammers to try blind combinations of first names and surnames in an attempt to hit on real addresses.

That's possible I suppose. But I would expect to be a long way down the list of the name combinations that they would try, as my surname is particularly rare - a quick search threw up only 90 people on the UK electoral roll with the same surname.

... unless they've got a legit address with your surname, and that pushed it further up the ranking.

I have several email accounts and the only one I get porn spam on is my Hotmail one - I always presumed it was because this one has my full name on it and my first name is normally considered to be a man's name.

Have not got any spam (so far) on any of my Gmail or Yahoo or other email accounts

But on Hotmail I am constantly getting stuff about how to enlarge my penis and people like Wendy and Tanya wanting to get to know me better. Gaaaaaaaa.


az

Spam is annoying full stop...

I must confess I dont really get that much on either my hotmail or gmail acocunts now.

However when I had a [email protected] email address I got effing loads.

Now given that my name aint that common either I think there must be some other reasoning as to why this sort of thing happens...

Keep in mind that if you email someone who has a virus on their machine, they could be sending the pr0n spam without knowing it.

Is it pronounced 'Ralph' Ferrett, or 'Raphe' Ferrett, like the poncey actor?

B

Quite true.

I've found Gmail to have a pretty good spam filter. There was a period at first when I got maybe a dozen a day in the spam box but they gradually went away and I had no spam at all for almost a year on any of my accounts. Within the last month I've started getting a couple a day on my 'real name' account, but that's starting to be whittled down now as I presume Gmail's filters start to recognise more of the parameters they need to block the damn stuff at their end.

Yes, the filters are good. Of these hoards of e-mail messages that I've started getting, all but a few of them have been caught and redirected to the spam box.

My real name account seems to be OK too - although its not my full real name ... Generally it seems quite good

I agree that your name would not be an easy name to guess

I don' worry about spam with gmail. Yes, the one in my real namegets a lot spam but it all (well 99.9%) gets filtered into my junkmail folder

Grey Desk if you would like another GMail addy I could send you an invite
I don't even look in the spam folder at gmail, I just delete it unread, so I don't give them a clue I exist

I'm going to smile for the rest of the day now I know Ferrettbadger's real name is Ferrett

I opened a couple of them, just to see if they were stylistically the same as the type that have invaded my freeserve e-mail addy over the years. (I'm told that this is safe to do provided one doesn't open any of the links. I hope I'm right )

Well they all looked fairly much as I would expect. A few lines of strangled english and an odd looking link at the bottom. That was until I got to the third one...

This third one I opened included a child porn image.

OK the image wasn't very big, it was pretty blurred, and on a scale of one to ten it wasn't very pornographic. But the fact remains that the two girls in the image have no clothes on and are probably about 8 years old. This makes it an offence under British law to possess this image. I'm going to somehow report this message to GMail if for no other reason than to cover my arse.

Poor choice of words, under the circumstances, one feels.

Nahh I am deffo a Ralph, and Ferrett is said just like the animal B .

Or maybe you have a virus on your own machine, malware or a trojen perhaps.

Have you got a decent updated anti virus and malware software and a good fire wall. Oh and don't use Internet explorer either that makes you a lot safer straight away.

don't forget to block the address too, GD

An to make your self really secure then don't use an windoews account with administrater privalges for internet use and rename the actual computer admin account (the one you access through safe mode) as some think else and have you computer flush its Windows page file every time you shutdown your computer, and you might be a little safer from virus and spyware and hackers. But only a little safer....

My security is pretty good. I've got all the tweaks and bangs from Norton SystemWorks. The firewall is zonealarm. And I've got the adaware and Spybot malware checkers.

I know enough not to go clicking on things unless I'm sure of where it is that I am. And I don't visit dodgy sites anyway.

As for Windows products, whilst my OS is Windows, that is pretty much the only one of theirs that I use. My browser is Opera and my office tools are StarOffice.

I'm pretty safe.