Spam/Junk E-mail – Elf Knows It [ARCHIVED]

by · 11th July 2008

I got a question today from John in Galway, He asked about spam e-mail in his Eircom Webmail account.

I have been using the same e-mail address for
about a year, and never had a problem with spam or junk e-mail, but
lately I have been getting swamped with it, I’m using Eircom web-mail
as my e-mail service, Why did the spam only start now? And how can I
stop it?
John
K

Going a year without any
spam is an accomplishment, not many people would have the comfort of
that! There is a number of reasons why spam could start flooding into
your inbox all of a sudden. The usual culprits would be:

  • You posted your
    e-mail on some form of a web message board or forum.

  • You joined a
    newsletter, some newsletter lists are listed to the public on some
    sites, not a lot but some do.

  • You have your e-mail
    showing to the public on a social networking profile.

  • Just
    unlucky!…Spam bots usually fire out e-mails to a string of
    addresses, such as     [email protected]
    then     [email protected]
    and so on, and when they receive a hit back from a certain address
    they know it’s valid and they keep sending to that e-mail

There is certain steps
you can take to combat the spam.

Eircom currently
offer a paid service, E-mail
Protector
for €2 / month, and the first two months free. More information is
available on the Eircom home page (home.eircom.net)

If you don’t want
to be paying for this service, which I think you shouldn’t
considering it’s a problem of everyday life, you can switch your
e-mail provider to Google’s Gmail (gmail.com)
or Microsoft’s Hotmail (hotmail.com).
Both have good free spam/junk
blockers built in.

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