Expert: Lorry - 9/15/2010

Question
Hello again Lorry,

Thank you for reading my e-mail, I hope you can help me.

I have been getting a whole lot of unwanted, unsolicited   advertising lately in Windows Mail. Mostly from pharmacies but also from other sites.

I do not open them, I just delete them, but they still represent 30% or 40% of my mail.

I tried to unsubscribe to them to no avail, most do not even allow for it.

I am using Windows Vista 64bit, with Avira Anti-Virus and SuperAntiSpyware, both free and all up to date.

Lorrie, what can I do to stop this annoying mail?

Thank you and regards, Ken.  

Answer
Hi Ken,

Some advice, even though late - do not ever try to unsubscribe, by doing that the scammers know that they found a legit. email address. Your best bet is to just delete them - nothing more. You could notify your server but the odds are that they aware of the problem already.

There is a great free program that will remove the "junk" mail for you. Check it out at:

http://download.cnet.com/MailWasher-Free/3000-2382_4-10192298.html

MailWasher works directly with your email server, exactly like your email program does. But there is one important difference: you can tell MailWasher to delete a message at the server, without downloading it - or you can bounce an email back to the sender so that it looks as though your address is not valid.

MailWasher retrieves information about all the emails on the server. With that information (some of which is also processed by MailWasher) you can decide what to do with each individual email - download, delete, or bounce back.

If you check your account with MailWasher first, you can delete or bounce the emails you do not want. Then, when you use your email program, it downloads only the remaining emails, those that you want to read.

MailWasher can be thought of as a "first line of defence" which can weed out junk, large wasteful attachments, and potentially harmful viruses.

Hope this helps!
Lorry