Mad Enough to Report a Spammer? (Read this FIRST...)

How do I get rid of those popup ads appearing in the lower right corner of my screen that are really phishing sites? (These started when I tried a link from your email that was supposed to take me to reverse phone numbers.)

Thunderbird does a great job of catching spam. So does gmail.
Mark it as spam once and it goes to your junk folder. From there it can be deleted. You can set it so the contents of the junk folder is automatically deleted. You won't ever see them again.

My answer to spam is to construct a filter to deal with it. It's no use making a filter to cull single messages, or single originators, as they change every day and you just start chasing you tail. So, I have a filter in my Thunderbird email client that is set to automatically delete any message from a sender who is not in my address book. It works a treat.

@ Clarence. The trouble with that is that tomorrow the spammer will use a different address/subject and spam you again. From my experience, spammers usually only use their addresses once, so it's a never ending job marking messages as spam. My filter catches them all, and deletes them automatically.

I don't think I have seen any spam for years. I use Gmail and Eset NOD32 antivirus.

In hotmail I report them as phishin. Seems to slow them down a bit.

In my experience, reporting spam is a pointless, time consuming task because when you get one spammer, ten more take over and the next day you get more spam into your inbox. My solution is to move all the spam that gets to my inbox to the spam folder so my email service's spam filtering system learns what is spam and what is not. I don't send out much email and I don't receive too much either (except for the newsletters I subscribe to) and about a quarter of the email I get is spam, and it is falling a bit year over year.

My2Cents,

Ernie (Oldster)

Use Protonmail. It's free and NO spam.

Hey Oldster. I think That I have you beat as far as being old. 80 here.

I use Signal Spam (https://signalants.signal-spam.fr/) as a Thunderbird addon. It's very simple to use. Effective? Probably yes to a degree.

From their FAQ:
"The objective of Signal Spam is to centralise spam reports in order to analyse them and help those, both public authorities and private actors, who are fighting against this scourge.

The reports made to Signal Spam are first analysed in order to improve knowledge of the phenomenon, in particular the evolution of spammers' techniques.

Thanks to this database, Signal Spam will be able to periodically publish studies on spam in France.

Alerts are also used to strengthen the security of the Internet.

Within this framework, the reports are transmitted, after having anonymized the reporting user, to technical partners who act to reinforce the security of the network, by fighting for example against the phenomenon of "zombie computers" or "phishing".

Signal Spam's partners undertake in this context to use these reports for the benefit of this technical fight against spam, in accordance with the legal provisions in force.

Finally, Signal Spam also undertakes to transmit reports, after having anonymised the reporting user, to the competent public authorities if they so request. In this way, Signal Spam actively participates in the authorities' fight against the authors of spam."

The problem with gmail's spam filter is that frequently they treat correct emails as spam - I've lost out on business this way. The only way to be sure with gmail is to visit their website (when I already use T'bird that is a real pain) and look through all the spam, to check there is nothing you need before gmail delete it after a month. May as well let it all through, but gmail don't allow that. Useless. SOmeone suggested Proton, but that decided to insist on identifying myself by a long phrase that I had never set up, so I lost all my Proton history file. Useless.

To misterfish
Although I have no experience, with T'bird, here's a couple of suggestions that will go a long way toward stopping Gmail's censorship:

You can set up a filter, in Gmail, which will move mail, from the spam folder to your inbox, where T'bird can pick it up. I use this process with Evolution (linux email client) and do spam filtering locally. This should prevent you losing business and having to log into Gmail to check the spam folder. I have found that a FEW emails fail to get moved, but that is pretty rare, in my experience over the past 5 years or so.

Alternatively, you MAY be able to set up T'bird to scan and download directly from the gmail spam folder. The IMAP setup, in Evolution, allows you to set which folders are scanned, but I found that filtering, locally, was not as successful as using the Gmail filter to move emails to the Gmail inbox for pickup. For some reason, filtering mail coming into the inbox always filters, but other scanned folders is hit or miss - YMMV.

Since I use a Mac computer, I use Apple's "Mail" client for emails (AT&T and Gmail). Some spam does come thru and "Mail" put most in the junk folder but a few still arrive in my inbox. Because some legit/important emails get sent to junk, I scan those to make sure they're spam, The email(s) I receive that are the phishing (really scary) type, I forward them to:
reportphishing@apwg.org
Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn't, perhaps I shouldn't even be doing that???

Let's not get into age(s) :-) I'm 86 and probably a youngster to many users's of Bob's great and timely information.

Beat you all. I'm 91.

Quite a few years ago I began to keep a record of the spam I received on Hotmail. I didn't do anything about it but it was interesting to see where it came from and how it moved around. Well, I did do something about a tiny bit of it - I sent a message to several ISPs that one of their clients seemed to be part of a botnet.

The most interesting was a paving company in Arizona that responded that they knew they had a problem with one computer but couldn't figure out which one and asked me to send them the IP address. So, that was fun.

No one brought up is to check who has access to your e-mail. I do check this as I have found companies I'm not using and sold or given my name to other companies. I delete them. This stopped a lot of spam I was getting.

I recently wrote to my elected officials in state and federal government. These spammers hide behind the name of legitimate corporations. Those who are elderly and/or gullible are especially vulnerable to losing their life's savings. I only heard back from 1 and it was a form letter about infrastructure.

I think that Mail Washer should be called Crap Mail Spreader. Nothing else to add