Spam

[Hackstaple]

I have just received over 600 spam messages in a few minutes. Despite having 3 types of Spam blocking in use they poured into my Inbox although about 450 were immediately diverted to the Spam folder which I have on my Outlook Express. It took me 10 minutes to remove the others from my Inbox. they virtually all took the form of Undeliverable Messages returned or "Your Enquiry Received". Most seemed to have the .de identifier for Germany.

[RJ_Paton]

You could try Thunderbird from http://www.mozilla.org/products/thunderbird/

It won't stop the spam but its filters are far more efficient than Outlook Express and can be "taught" to identify new sources of spam.

[kerryb]

Falkyrn

Ditto - you beat me to it while I was looking for the link!!!

kerryb

[Hackstaple]

Been there - done it. I found that Thunderbird never filtered Spam to any real extent. That was on a trial lasting 3 months.

[RJ_Paton]

Been there - done it. I found that Thunderbird never filtered Spam to any real extent. That was on a trial lasting 3 months.

That surprises me , I've found Thunderbird far better than Outlook which I previously used ( I have never liked Outlook Express- ranking it next to useless for almost any purpose - personal opinion  )

[1000xlch]

I tend to use netscape and not ie and never use outlook express.  My mail is at yahoo and it seems to cope very well with the spam and filters most out.

John Rowley

[PrueM]

THunderbird (mail) and Firefox (browser) for me.  I've got both programs on my PC and also on my (far superior  ) Mac.  The spam on the PC has dropped to almost nothing, and the best thing is that I get NO POP-UPS when I'm on the internet.  That's a big plus.

I personally recommend everyone should use a Mac.  Still virus-free after how many years??

Cheers 
Prue

[Hackstaple]

It seems that I was the only member hit by this sudden avalanche of spam. I receive a large amount of spam each day as I have a commercial email address as well as a personal one but normally my filters throw about 95% of it into the Spam folder and then delete it 24 hours later. This came addressed to both identities that I have to use for email. Some was filtered out , about two-thirds - the rest arrived in my normal Inbox. this has never happened before. I have SpamBully version 3, Norton Anti-virus [updated Friday] and Microsoft Spam filter Beta version. In addition my ISP has spam filtering.
I do not use Thunderbird because I found it had no real spam learning mechanism - even items specifically pointed as spam came through. I do not use Mozilla as a browser as it is not compatible with my eBay selling activities - it will not allow me to use the eBay toolbar which verifies whether messages are spoofs or genuine - same, of course applies to Netscape which uses the same platforms. Thunderbird may be fine for people who have no commercial use of email.
I have never seen what the objection is to the function of Outlook Express - I send or receive about 2000 genuine emails a year and have difficulties with perhaps one a month.

[RJ_Paton]

It is likely that you were hit by a problem at your ISP.

Re outlook express ..... I personally find it one of the worst Microsoft products ever to have graced a computer ..... although I have used outlook for a number of years the two programs share nothing except a partial name.

Thunderbird is used by a great number of commercial organisations and is just as suited to that area of work as its counterparts.

Re Firefox as a browser ... many of the add ons for such things as ebay are becoming available as it gains market share ..... (many of these add ons are rumoured to be unlikely to work when Internet Explorer itself is updated.)

While I use several browsers for my commercial design work my personal preference is to Firefox.