Should i Bounce Spam?

[Guest ComputerBob]

Cluttermagnet -You make some good points. A few days ago, jbredmound linked us to that same spam report:http://www.scotsnewsletter.com/forums/inde...l=spamreport&s=

[Guest LilBambi]

It is for sure that spammers are getting more annoying by the day.They are definitely messing up the Internet in the same way that Telemarketers have messed up the telephone system.Darn shame too.

[Guest ComputerBob]

They are definitely messing up the Internet in the same way that Telemarketers have messed up the telephone system.

Telemarketers are much more fun to deal with than spammers. If a telemarketer calls me and gives me a chance to talk, I tell them that I'm not interested, and please remove me from their list, reminding them that they are required by Federal law to do so.If a telemarketer calls me and does not give me a chance to talk, I set the phone down and walk away, then check back after a few minutes to see if they're still talking. Amazingly, about half of them are still talking. Sometimes, I set the phone down next to the TV, to let them listen to whatever I'm watching at the time.I figure that if telemarketers are willing to invade my privacy with unwanted sales pitches, the least I can do is waste as much of their time as possible or even make the call as stressful as possible for them.Other ideas I've had, but have never been brave enough to do, are to listen to their entire pitch and then:[*] "I would love to buy it, but the court order doesn't allow me to buy things over the phone any more."[*] "Sure, why not? The guy who owns this credit card sure is gonna be surprised."[*] Senseless baby talk[*] Choking sounds, followed by the thud of someone falling to the ground and pleas of 'Help! Help!'[*] "Oh, what did you say? I wasn't listening."[*] The Seinfeld approach - "Tell me your home phone number, and I'll call you to talk about it later. Oh, you don't want me to call you at home? Well, now you know how I feel." (click)

[Guest LilBambi]

Good ones! LOL!Another fun way to answer the phone, that seems to throw the telemarketers off is to answer the phone as follows:"Jimmy's Cookie Jar, which crumb do you want?"

[havnblast]

eheheheh Yea I like those ideas too, gonna have to use them.

[jbredmound]

When I lived in Phoenix , the telemarketers were having their way with me. I bought (from QWEST), a service designed to thwart them, which sent all "blocked" callers to an answering service before the phone even rang at home! What did they do? Well, they started having folks call from their home phones...no block, no protection.Bec and I finally went to cell phones, 100%. Our home line was the DSL connection and the security system line. That ended our problem! We lived that way for over a year and a half. It had it's advantages; for me, I no longer had to wade through her messages to get to mine.Do you see the similarities? Throw away email addresses vs using the phone line of a contract employee?It's all the same gig, you know, just a slightly different medium. Big problem is, we can't switch to cell phones.My thought right now is, I (almost) religiously cleanse my history, registry, etc, etc, to keep the boogie man out, and I receive zero spam at a one year old address that I am afraid I am not that careful with. Is Mailwasher prevention or repair? I don't need Mailwasher; does that mean anything? Where do we go when Mailwasher and being prudent are not enough?

[ikara]

I havn't seen anyone mention this before, so I thought I would just let you know about a small problem I found with Mailwasher, It only applies to addresses like Hotmail, that have JUNK mail filtering built-in. I have 4 of these addresses, and since Mailwasher only reads mail from the inbox, all the spam coming via the JUNK mail-box still goes straight to your e-mail program, unless you want to take the risk that some wanted message has gone that way, you need to manually filter each one yourself.What I have done is to switch all the mail filtering in each account off, and now Mailwasher gets them all and I can easily screen the lot in one go.