SecretLeeds - History, culture and architecture in Leeds

Anyone been happy to give their e mail address out to people who have asked them for it for one reason or another. Then you have found that suddenly you start receiving spam messages which were not suitable or wanted? I have done it a few times trusting who I thought was a friend and then getting the usual deluge of rubbish spam. I don't want to get a 4inch height to my p e n I s being a woman, I don't want to sue anyone for P P I, I don't want to join s e x online, and I certainly don't want to buy drugs or join the usual thriller of C a n a d i a n Pharmacy . BUT, you get them when you have to give your e mail out.    I know this is nothing to do with Leeds from where I was born, but when I was younger no one had heard of the WWW and I must admit I wish I hadn't sometime. ????

there are sites where you can get a temporary e mail that will work for a few hours, you then use them where someone demands an email but you don't want any further contact.    

Used to have an email address specifically for anyone I thought might spam me and it worked fine until the site I got it from closed down.look for anywhere offering a free email address and sign up then use that .if you periodically check it to clear out rubbish and make sure you didn't inadvertently send it to someone by accident(as I did once to a good friend!) you should be OK.

Get a Gmail account, the spam filters are so good that it really makes no difference where you put your email address. I have a number of addresses visible on public websites, contact us pages, that sort of thing. And yet I am very rarely/never offered cheap Viagra online or other such tempting offers. The problem is your email provider - spam really should be (from a user point of view) a thing of the past.

Thanks for your advice. Quite true DSCO. You would think they would have sorted it out by now. Although they offer a catch the@..... e mail address and stop further attacks, they don't take intoconsideration like the Canadian Pharmacy which is used by millionsof @addresses. There should be some way of capturing the first namestoo as when it does capture the address it has nothing but letters and numbers as its address. If you get my gist lol.

4 inches ??? You don't still have the details do you ?

Try this www.anextrainchforyou.comseriously I never put my addy online, too many spambots. If I ever have to then I would leave spaces between such as jennifer . aniston @ friends united . com.Its the way I tell em!!!!

Often the 'unsubscribe' link in these spam emails is a disguise for a link to look at the website. Clicking it shows that your email is 'live'. So don't.

As this is part of what I do for a living, I can tell you it's next to impossible to actually stop spam short of never ever giving your email address to anyone (and there are programmes that just randomly try name combinations at major providers and then add them to lists when they don't bounce). Gmail is very very good at minimising spam, as you'd hope, with Hotmail/Outlook.com not very far behind.

Being fairly social and active online, I don't have a choice my email address is well used and abused (Ive had the same one for 10+ years now also).Best solution I have is everything is filtered to junk, then I have manually select you as an acceptable contact for you to appear in my inbox.Does have a disadvantage of if I'm not expecting mail, I may not see it immediately, but down the years I think Ive only missed a handful of emails of 1000's so it works ok.