Failure Of E-Mail?

[jambutty]

The only email address in my address book is my own. Then if my computer starts to send out emails I will get one. I’ve done this ever since the long gone days when me and my trusty Amiga A1200 dipped our toes in the Internet waters. Knowing that I didn’t send it, it would alert me to something sneaky on my computer. It has only happened to me once yonks ago and AVG took care of the infidel. But I do get the occasional email that claims to have been sent by me. I’m not computer clever enough to figure out how it is done so I just delete it.

Instead of using the address book I have created a folder, imaginatively named “Emails” in which I store individual Word pages.

At the top of the page is the name of my contact and it is saved under that name.

Below is their email address and underneath I compose my email to them.

Once I am satisfied with my message I click on the email address, which is an active link to launch Outlook Express’ New Message window when clicked on. This window comes up with the recipient’s email address already in place so all I have to do is to copy and paste my message and hit Send.

Having 5 email addresses like I do, the “From” field has a drop down menu and I can select which email address to use. Its default is my standard email address.

If you don’t have Word you can use NotePad or WordPad but the email address does not become an active link. You would have to launch Outlook Express’ New Message window by yourself and copy and paste the recipient’s email address into the “To” field.

I access my ISP mailbox via their web site and it has a guess at what is spam and dumps it in the spam folder. OK so it sometimes gets it wrong and tags legit emails. But a simple return to my “Inbox” stops it happening again. I can also tag any spam that the system misses and Spam Guard makes sure that any future spam goes straight to the spam folder, does not pass go, does not collect £200 and gets deleted after one week.

After that I use MailWasherPro to interrogate all incoming emails and it too will tag any spam. I can tag any spam that it misses so that next time I get an email from that address MailWasher will tag it automatically. Downloading the good emails to Outlook Express automatically deletes the spam.

At the end of all that ZoneAlarm Suite catches whatever gets through and that doesn’t happen very often.

Finally I NEVER, EVER respond to a spam email asking them to take me off their mailing list. All that would do is tell them that your email address is active and it would be sold on as an active email address and you would get even more spam.

Not too long ago before I dumped that particular email address I started to get a spam email every few seconds 24/7.

All my email addresses now use 6 or 8 random characters as the user name so they cannot be guessed quite so easily.