Warning: Watch out for spam
 

I set up a yahoo email account to contact hotels, etc. for planning a trip to Europe. I have not used the account for anything else.

I am now getting spam sent there. Since I've never made the address public and the login name is cryptic (it can't be guessed by combining normal words, as spammers will often do) someone I emailed must have passed the address along to a spammer or has his address book hacked.

Fortunately, the yahoo account is a throw away that I will cease using when the trip is over. I would advise everyone to do the same. Do not give out your real email address to anyone you don't know, including hotels, etc. It's easy to set up a temporary account that you can discard later.

Do you have your spam filter set on your yahoo account? Check under options.

ANY email account will get piles of spam unless the server it is on has a really strong spam filter. And then the recent "spoofed" emails suggesting that your account will be frozen if you don't use this pasword to login on the website they provide can get through. Because my work email IT department has it's nose up its b**** I get more spam there than anywhere. Unfortunately I don't have the option to "toss" that email. Ironically I get the least spam on my hotmail account, but again I have the spam filter option set.

Spam can be "caused" by people foolish enough to open attachments from such emails and thus having their address list used to generate spam, but a good portion of spam is "spoofed", thus the blame should NOT be laid on any person to whom you have sent email.

You miss the point, which is to avoid giving out your email address to anyone, even hotels.

Besides

Yahoo spam filters are of minimal help. You get only 15 and you can't even begin to effectively filter spam with on 15.

"thus the blame should NOT be laid on any person to whom you have sent email."

Read my message again. I said that they may have been hacked. But that doesn't change anything. Sending mail to people with so little notion of security is effectively the same as sending it directly to the spammers.

Lastly, Hotmail should be avoided at all cost. They record headers to all messages received. You have absolutely 0 privacy with them. Yahoo is marginally better.

Fascinating discussion on travel...

wb -- I was just trying to be helpful -- and since baleon doesn't understand what *I* am saying I will desist :D

As you can see, my e-mail address is displayed here, as it has been about 7000 other times here, and I do not perceive that it has anything to do with the spam I receive.

I believe that spam needs "us" to catch it, send it into our spam folder where it can be dealt with by people who run mail servers, and ultimately pursued by those who have the authority to tackle it with criminal and financial penalties.

Best wishes,

Rex

Just for info, many spammers use randomly generated lists of addresses ([email protected], or yahoo, or aol, etc). Given the massive numbers of users of these Webmail services, the chances are that many of the addresses will prove to be real.
Try opening a hotmail address, give the address to NO-ONE, and watch the spam flood in. The best way to avoid this is to open a webmail account with a less common domain name (e.g. with Mail.com, where you can choose from a variety of domains).

One of my experiences with those random mailers, Hotmail in this case:

Signed up for the account. Long and arbitrary name, including digits. Gave the address to no one, didn't enter it for registration or for more information etc one a single website. Left for two weeks and found several spam emails when I got back. How? I left the email box unused and checked it every now and then and after a couple of months, I had thousands, all unopened.

I found that an interesting experiment. Could be that a mass mailer happened to hit that address combo and Hotmail sent a receipt on arrival. You would hope, as the only other alternative was that the list was being passed along by Hotmail themselves.

Ah, I missed your post hanl. You'd already pointed out the joys of Hotmail.

I've had both hotmail and yahoo mail accounts for quite a long time. I get some spam, but not any large amount. There must be some other factor involved.

what's the point of having an e-mail address if you're not going to give it to anyone?? Surely the idea is that you have it so people can correspond with you??

I have a yahoo eml account. About 1 in 30 spams get through.

I have 3 yahoo mail accts:
1. junk, ie newsletters, forms that insist they need an email, whatever
2. just for travel confirmations
3. family/friends

therefore, the one I really want to keep doesn't get used online, other than for the emails.
I get the most spam on #1, just as one would expect. Rarely get spam on the other two.
HOTMAIL IS THE PITS, don't go there except to set up an acct for one-time use, ie. a trip. Yahoo does a fairly good job of sorting junk into the bulkmail file, so you can glance at headings/senders and then delete w/ one click.

Cailin - like Travelnut explained, there are many reasons people use e-mail addresses. Corresponding with friends and family is ONE, but shopping or booking hotels online might be another, in which case it makes sense to have at least two accounts so that you can keep your friends/family e-mail private and use the other one with abandon without worrying you'll get too much spam in your "good" account.

Andrea_expat

I too have several e-mail addresses for work, family/friends/spam, etc.

However, my point was that if you don't give your e-mail address to anyone, how can they correspond with you? Therefore - you MUST give your private e-mail address to friends and family in order for them to e-mail you at that address. Sorry...I was being pedantic!