How do I stop the emails which keep appearing in my bulk folder which ar eprobably dodgy?

[MegaLegs]

My spam filter is on and anything suspect goes into a bulk folder. Everyday for the past month I have had suspect emails which have a sender name like John, Pete and a subject line of Collect your gift or returning your messgae.

I always delete them without opening as I guess they could be viruses?

Is there anyway I can stop them all together - I have one from John telling me to collect a gift everyday.

We get roughly 44 spam e-mails a day ( and prob only 1 we actually want !!) -I await to see if anyone has ideas for how to actually stop it - I didn't think you could.

Have just been looking in the help section of our service provider.

I can block the emails from this sender but to get the address I would need to open the email which I am scared to do - if it was a virus type thing would it just be dangerous to open the attachment or the actual email?

Yes - DO NOT open e-mails that you are unsure of. Delete them. There are virus scans you can put them through but they would have been most likely scanned by your virus package anyway, so this would be pointless.

There is not much you can do but to ignore them. Do not reply to them either or they will keep coming. They will stop eventually when they get no response from you or they get stopped at source. It is a bit frustrating i know.

If you are a business or the volume is startling - get in touch with your ISP. They can track the IP address of the sender for you. I deal with spam daily at the website i work for and i can search the IP adress to see where it has come from and contact the ISP and report it. They then get a kind of traffic light grading which marks them out for future business.

Also make sure that evryone who uses that PC is aware of the problem. Some viruses are 'trojan-horse' or 'piggy-back' that have come in through a reliable contact without them knowing. However - just make sure that all users are only visiting reliable websites as the more dubious ones or 'free' ones are where the viruses all hang out.

I get over a thousand a day - I run a few websites so my email address is online a lot.

Don't put your email address on websites and if you can, get dummy disposable email addresses from your ISP (who is your ISP? If it's BT Internet, then you can have I think up to twenty and just keep ditching them if they get very spammy).

Or use a whitelist system wherein only people in your address book are automatically delivered and everyone else gets a message back with a link which they have to click in order to confirm they aren't spammers. These progs are a bit of a PITA if you ask me but they do work.

Personally I use mailwasher because I like the GUI.