Spam Mail

[roundboy]

I have recently gone onto Blueyonder Broadband. When 1st installed I had no firewall and it would seem my email address was available to the world and it's mother for about 36 hours. The good people at Telewest advised me about firewalls and spyware and spam mail and also told me about your site. I have downloaded window washer, Ad-Aware, Spy-Bot and Spamihilator and they all work great apart from Spamihilator. I receive about 20 spam emails a day and it hasn't spotted one. I've added email addresses to the blocked list, I've enabled the learning filter and increased the aggressiveness - nothing happens. Can anybody help?

[NHH]

Hi there..

Just one point that you may already know, Firewalls & Anti-Spyware tools have nothing to do with your email. SO not having a firewall doesn't directly expose your email address to the outside world.

The only way your email address becomes exposed is if you use the email address for registering programs and accounts on websites and forums. Once you do this your email address ends up on one or more big mailing lists that sites use to send you spam / advertising.

Many people (including myself) have one email address just for the purpose of using to sign-up to forums, websites & programs (commonly known as a spam catcher)... and another email address just for personal use (which you never give out on the web)

Now that you already have too much spam arriving at your personal mailbox your options are;

• Use a decent spam blocking program (which you have already done)
  or
  
• Create a new email address for personal use only (i.e. not for posting on the web).
  

Now... you've installed Spamihilator which is a great program but you're having problems getting it to work.
This says to me that after installing Spamihilator you haven't gone on to changing the necessary settings in your email program (probably Outlook Express) to route your emails through Spamihilator.
You can find instructions on how to do this HERE

Hope that helps..
Just let me know if you need some more help.