Genealogy Chat

There's been a lot of posting in regards to e-mail boxes being swamped with spam. To redirect spam, try setting up one of the free e-mail accounts at either: H o t m a i l - www(.)hotmail(.)com or Y a h o o - www(.)yahoo(.)com When ever an e-mail account is asked for when signing up for message boards, services, anything that requires you to give an e-mail address, use the free account you've set up. Site's often sell your e-mail addresses to spammers which is one (of several) reasons you get swamped with spam. The only requirement both sites have is that you access your account at least once every 30 days to keep it valid. I have several e-mail accounts with both. Of the two free e-mail account providers, I find that I like Y a h o o better for several reasons. One, they allow you more storage space. H o t m a i l offers 2 MB of e-mail space where Y a h o o offers 4 MB of space. I've also found H o t m a i l tends to censor my mail, especially mail with attachments, picking and choosing what I receive and shouldn't. I wouldn't have been aware I was missing e-mails if the senders hadn't bought it to my attention. There were several GC members who were also having trouble getting e-mails I was trying to send them with attachments. I think H o t m a i l's virus / spam filter is needs to be turned down....I do get some e-mails sent with attachments....just not all of them. Judy

Just a thought Judy I have and e-mail account on cable TV which I haven't used for about a year (it's rubbish) it has no usage restrictions and is a valid account so I could use this. Do you have this in the States? ( if you say no I will be gobsmacked). Bob

Judy Having read all the problems with spam, I'm gobsmacked! I get a spam alert when I receive some newsletters, but I've NEVER received any spam I didn't want! I have Norton Internet Security, and I'm with BT Openworld which give you a spam filter option, which I've got, but so far there's been no spam in the folder. What you said about H O T M A I L has made me wonder, though. I've recently made contact with a cousin I've been searching for, for years. She has H O T M A I L, and it keeps returning the emails with scans of photographs I and another cousin have been trying to send her. I reduced the size of the photo right down, just in case that was the problem, but it didn't help. Have you any tips I can pass on to her, or is there nothing she can do? Janet

Is there not a limit on hot-mail on the size of attatchments? About one megabyte? Perhaps this may be the problem. Bob

Bob That's what made me prick up my ears, although the largest attachment I tried to send was 200kb and the smallest 96kbs. I couldn't get either to go through. What I did was to copy my photograph and pasted it into a word document, and added text, so that the attachment was actually a word document. I can't see that there is anything else I can do. I have no problems sending them through to everyone else in the family. I did wonder if their inbox was full, but I sent an ordinary email afterwards, and that didn't get returned, so obviously not!

Bob: We have WebTV here in the States. An account like that would work just as well to use for an extra mailbox to divert spam. Janet: There are a number of reasons H o t m a i l account users often miss getting mail, or a sender has difficulty sending mail. Bob is right, about size. Pictures take up a lot of space and h o t m a i l gives you very little. A H o t m a i l account user may recieve a picture or two but if a H o t m a i l account holder doesn't get around to opening mail or reads it and leaves it once its read, that's room being taken up on the H o t m a i l server. Both new and old need to be gotten rid of as a build up of mail will prevent you from recieving mail....that's true of any e-mal provider. Once you surpass your mailbox quota, you'll stop gettng mail. If you and a cousin are both sending her pictures, with the minimal MB of space she has, she'll never get them. You could suggest to her to try another e-mail provider that offers more space. H o t m a i l does have larger mailboxes, as does Y a h o o, for a small yearly fee. Y a h o o also offers the larger, free, e-mail account. You and your picture sending cousin could also each open Y a h o o accounts, e-mail your pictures to the Y a h o o address and send the access information to the cousin who is having difficulty receiving....where theres a will theres a way! LOL Judy

Judy Thanks very much for the advice! Opening a separate email account is an EXCELLENT idea! I'll have a word with the others. Thanks - you're a diamond! Janet

Sue....just checked received your e-mail and will respond accordingly. I don't use H o t m a i l or Ya h o o for GC, I have high speed internet account I use for here. When I initially signed up, I did use Y a h o o as address and changed in options once I was signed on so if spam mail was going to be coming due to my signing up at this site, it's now going to Y a h o o account. Judy

Don't forget to Google your email address to see if it appears on the internet. You'll be amazed at what you might see. If a search engine finds it so will spammers. Crista

Oh my! Thanks for that Google tip Crista! I googled one of many of my e-mail accounts and found that one of the organizations I once belonged to had made some changes to their site and unpassword protected, by accident, a part of the site where personal information was placed in the members section. My name, address, home phone #, cell phone #, and legal and accounting reports are all over for anyone wishing to review! I've contacted the website administrator to remove the confidential parts of the site that they no longer are using but still remains on their server! A big thanks as that's not something I thought to do! Judy

I use Zone Alarm as a Firewall, Spampal as a mail filter and also the message rules in Outlook Express. This cuts spam down and also sites looking at my PC. I also use various e mail addresses so attachments etc are more liable to get through. Attachments may also be a problem due to their file extension names. Abit of poking about in settings might reveal something. Bob Geeson

Crista Thanks for the tip about the email address. I just put mine in and it came up! It was on one website where I left a message on the guest book. I've contacted them and asked them to remove it! Phew! Janet

Another way to send a lot of photos with no worry about space is to register with dotphoto. It's free and you can set up albums and send them from dotphoto direct with an email. Di.

Thank you for the tip I am about to ask for my email to be taken off a site. Mary

If you transcribe for the Scan2 syndicate your email address is indexed by search engines Crista

Would just like to point out that with Y a h o o you get 6MB worth of free space in your mailbox compared to H o t m a i l ' s less than generous 2MB. Never been that fond of H o t m a i l.

Thanks for the tip Crista I too found a site with my addy on and have asked them to delete it. Anyone reading this thread is going to be boggled by the time they get here... My opinion (for what its worth) is that once again you pays your money and you takes your choice. If you want an e-mail service that has lots of storage and copes with big attachments you aint going to get it for nothing. £20 or so per year for 25MB of e-mail storage and 10MB attachment limit doesn't seem a lot to me and I bet there are better bargains than that. If you just want to send and recieve messages then any of the free services will do as long as you keep deleting the old stuff. Most heavy users have several accounts which they use for different purposes. I have often created a new h o t m a i l account just to subscibe to a service I wanted to try. If it doesn't work out I abandon it. By this means I have avoided some at least of the spam. Spam is an international problem and the US and the EU are introducing legislation that will help to reduce it. In the end it is the ISPs that will stop it. Bob

I have just done a Google search. It only brought up the ONE site on which I knew had my email. I need it there for contacts, it's an association information site. So, my email is not all over the web BUT I get about 150 spam messages per day. Of these about 100 are stopped by my ISP and the rest I manually send to their email protection. I never open the emails that are obviously spam. The strange thing is that my husband never gets spam even though its the same account! My spam started long before my email address was on the information site I mentioned above. Anne

Vivien: Google is a search engine. To do a Google search, go to www(.)google(.) and put in a keyword, phrase, or your own e-mail address, that you wish to find information on. Google when then list the results, in the form of links that you can click on and check out. It's one of the better search engines out there on the Internet. Judy :)

Another good idea is to make your email address a bit complex. Don't just use your name because that can be guessed. Try a combination of letters and numbers. For instance, I could use CR15T4 instead of Crista.