Monday, December 31, 2012

Hotmail Spam Emails

It's New Year's Eve! What do you guys have planned? I don't really celebrate the New Year because we have Chinese New Year, which is usually in late January. Every year, Chinese New Year falls on a different day. Looking at a Chinese calendar is the only way I can tell when the big day is :P Crazy, huh?

Well, I have been babysitting these past few days and yesterday while the baby was sleeping, I handmade a few cards! I'll post about that one later, with pictures and all.

This post will be about the dreaded spam emails. I've had my Hotmail account for about... six years now. And I can probably say majority of the emails I receive... are spam! There is no one way to get rid of this problem, but here are a few tips I have used:

  • Be careful who you share your email with. I created a separate email for college purposes only and I used it for applying to scholarships. In return, it seems as if the companies sold my email to advertisers. Any company can sell your email. Even something as innocent as a scholarship! Treat your email like your phone number.
  • Unsubscribe. One very time-consuming method is to click through each spam email and find the "unsubscribe" link at the bottom. I used this method for a while, until I realized it didn't help much. Then I read an article that doing this can even bring in more spam. How? If the company sees you are an active user of that email address, they will bug you even more. 
  • Block them. This is another time-consuming method, but I find it to be the most useful. Since I have a Hotmail, I go to Options > Safe and Blocked Senders > Blocked Senders. Then, I open each email (again,  this might not be very safe) and find the sender of the spam email. I take the domain and enter it onto the Blocked Senders list. What is the domain part of the email? @IWantToSpamYou.com, @SpamCompany.com... it's basically the last part of the email. The domain includes the @ symbol. What this does is, any email with that domain will be blocked. The spam could be sent from a Robert or Bill with the same domain. Both emails will be blocked :)
These are a few methods I use or have used to combat those annoying spam emails. What are your strategies?

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Okay, so I forgot to add a random picture yesterday. I'm just going to stick a cute kitty in here... hehe.


5 comments:

  1. Great tips! I have a Gmail, and lately I've been getting a lot of spam from makinglifebetter.com, which I've never heard of before... weird. Other than that, I really don't get much other spam. I do check my spam box everyday, though, because it tends to catch a lot of stuff that ISN'T spam. Really frustrating. :P

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    1. I have a Gmail too (because of Blogger, lol). I'm not sure how you can block email senders... but I'm sure there's a way. Look around :)

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    2. I'll try! BTW, I just nominated you for a Liebster Award! Check out this link for the details: http://www.thebellebeautyblog.blogspot.com/2013/01/liebster-award.html

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  2. My dad worked in Singapore and then Shanghai for a while and always talked about how cool Chinese New Years was! I want to go so desperately one day!

    I keep seeing where people are having a lot of problems with spam! Probably only a matter of time before it happens for me as well.... :(

    katiechamel.blogspot.com
    giveaway!

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    1. Oooh, that's exciting! You definitely should go! :D

      I've been getting spam on my blog too, that's why I put the word verification up. Don't worry if you do get spam (email or blog). There are ways to reduce or stop it altogether :)

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