Email plague

[Aggers]

Last week Mrs A signed up, on my laptop, to a website for playing on-line Bridge.

Since then I have been receiving about 20 e-mails every day from all sorts of websites.
Most have her name on them, so it seems certain that my e-mail address has been
passed on (sold?) to them by the Bridge-playing site.

I know I can delete them, but is there anything else I can do to stop these unwanted e-mails?

[cruiser2]

I have several email addresses. I use one where a lot of the junk alll goes.
I occasionaly open some of them and click the unsubscibe button.
Otherwise I just delete them all which are showing in the Inbox or the Spam folder

[Osc]

I'm currently unsuscribing from most of the unwanted emails that land in my Inbox, so annoying

[Diflower]

As Osc says, unsubscribe is all you can do - go to the bottom of the email, there is usually a link saying 'to unsubscribe click here'.
And yes it's ok to click on those, so long as it looks like it's from a legitimate site

[Rodo]

If you are on Yahoo you can put their email address in your Banned Emails section.

[Workingman]

Sadly John, I think the others are right.

You need to go to your e-mail website and, from there, opt out of as many as you can. Then you need to flag them up as spam. Then you need to trash them and delete them - empty the trash can.

I got into the same situation when I visited compare the market dot com. Damned annoying.

[Suff]

What everyone else has said. Although you do need to be careful with unsubscribe. If the site is not legit, it only tells the spammers that you are alive.

Most of my mail comes through Yahoo and I find the spam filter quite good. Sadly blocking a lot of these addresses is a waste of time because they are one time addresses.

When giving out email addresses I have a few rules.

If they are not going to send me a subscribe link, then they get noddy@toytown.com which equates to "you don't need to know". BTW toytown.com is a valid domain, god knows how much spam noddy gets.....

If they want me to subscribe and I have to response to a subscribe link, then they get a sink gmail account which I rarely if ever bother to read the mail on. Mainly to empty it.

If I want to subscribe to something which I want notification to be sent to me, then I give one of my 4 main email addresses.

It mainly works for me.

To understand the scale of this, Linde Gas blocks about 1.5 billion spam mails a quarter...

[victor]

where on Yahoo is this banned e-mails section?

[Suff]

Glad you asked that Victor. I just had a look at the settings.

Go to the top right to the cog icon (settings).

In the tabs on the left you have Security and blocked addresses.

In the blocked addresses you can put in up to 500 addresses you want to block and they will be totally banned.

In the Security tab you have two features

Delete Spam older than (I use one week to keep it clean),

The next one I had forgotten about but is extremely useful.

Disposable addresses. You create a disposable address and use it for sites which insist that you register. You can then get the registration link to your mailbox but if that address starts generating spam, you can just delete it. In this way you can just create a one time, or one month, address to get access to a site and then delete it.

Not sure if this is a business feature. My Yahoo mailbox is a Business one and not a free one. I pay the princely sum of around $9 a month for 10 business mailboxes.....

[Aggers]

I think I have managed to stop the flow of unwanted e-mails.

The e-mail company in question is GMX. I transferred all the unwanted
emails to 'Garbage', and then deleted the lot. I haven't had any today, so
maybe I've solved my problem. I certainly hope so.

Thanks for all your replies - they gave me hope and ideas.