Spam Private messages

[BeeE586]

I have received a PM of the sort usually caught in in the e-mail spam trap, i.e from Sierra Leone with a sob story but also offering me X million dollars.

Short of banning all PM's (which I don't want to do) is there any way of avoiding such things ?

Eileen

[Sue Mackay]

I got one too but noticed she already had Banned under her User Name so presumed that Bo Peep had wielded her axe. At least it only took each of us one second to delete, whereas the misguided soul must have spent ages trying to PM people individually. I suspect that Bo Peep has been shielding us from a lot of this sort of thing, for which many thanks.

[Raphael]

Sorry about the PMs folks. This person was banned immediately after I had been tipped of by Kathy.

Great Work Pam,

I have a junk file, which puts any mail not in my address book straight into it.
Unfortunately the other day a close friend of mine sent an email of the jokey type Email, which was the usual Pyramid Scam, which usually like many ends up with, "pass this on to a specific number of your friends"....a sure sign of Spamming.

As it was from my friend in my Address Book I opened it, and found it had been forwarded to 16 open(blue) email address's as Cc Mail. and been forwarded previous a number of times making a total of 76 open EMail addresses. (Without going too deep into the technicallities) I decrypted it and found the original sender had used 5 proxy addresses, before it was originally sent on it's way to try to cover up the source.

It was from an mass marketing advertising firm in California America.
This company among 1000's of others also uses the popup "Your Computer may be at risk"
click here for a free clean up. This usually scans your computer (if you allow it) and informs that your computer has suspicious files, and offers a free program for 30 days, which is boni fide, then persists in asking you to buy it. The files it says are suspicious are usually your Temp and index files that all computers make when using them, and if set up properly are erased when you close down. Unfortunatey Virus hackers can also use these as stepping stones to inflltrate your computer, when some users do not use or set up thier Virus scanner and other programs correctly.

I am sorry to rant on about this, but 60% of spam is generated by nieve users, who learn the hard way. When writing to a group of friends NEVER use Cc: use Bcc then each individual only sees their mail, and the others will not be visible (It is called Blind Copy).

The reason I have been so long winded on this subject is because, previously I worked for many years for large World Wide German IT Company, as a Lan & Wan Area IT trouble shooter, and we had several 100's of computers on Dual back up Servers. And it was a full time job combatting these spurious get rich quick advertising agencies & spam generators.

I apprecialte that some sites need "cookies" which also help pay for and assist in the running of a site, but if you finish workng on a reputable site, close it down before going onto different site....unless of course it is neccessary to "multi task" between them both.

Sorry to rant on...there's a lot more....but that's enough I think. :-))

Kind regards to All
Take care

Raphael UK & (D)

[BeeE586]

I have just had another look at the message and noticed 'Banned' under the name which I had missed before. Fool that I am, I too should have notified Bo - sorry Bo, but thank you for looking after us. Message now deleted.

Eileen