Dear Computer Lady,
I am using “Outlook” for my email and am constantly getting dirty emails in my junk folder which, when I attempt to block them, seem to be coming from my own email address.
Would you tell me how I can fix this. I tried blocking them, phishing scams, and just plain deleting them. Nothing works and the number of emails which I receive seem to be increasing?
Thank you, Anne
Dear Anne,
Unfortunately, once your email address gets on those spammers lists, there is no good way to get it off. The fact that they are using your email address as the return address makes it even harder to block them.
You only have a couple of choices, either invest your money and time into an email filtering program, or change your email address.
An email filtering program requires that you spend time training the program about which messages you want to see and which are junk mail. Here is a list of the top 10 spam filters:
www.toptenreviews.com/software/security/best-spam-filter/
If you do change your email address, I would consider switching to Gmail since they have the best spam filter I have ever used. You can even set Gmail up to retrieve messages from your current email address and the junk will be filtered out before you see it.
Elizabeth
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Elizabeth Boston is a Web designer, Social Media Consultant and managing editor of, “Ask The Computer Lady”.
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Hello Anne,
In addition to Elizabeth’s excellent answers, I adopted the following approach
which possibly sound counter-intuitive, but give you more peace.
Change your perception or attitude towards spam.
Don’t focus on it . Unfortunately it’s a fact of life but can relatively easy be managed…
No need to invest in more filtering (but see below)- Outlook already contains filters and instead of setting up new filters in yet another program, do the filtering in Outlook and set the parameters.
Mail from certain domains or with certain contents or words go to Junk or get deleted to Trash
depending on your settings.
Why else does spam appear in the Junk folder?
This folder has a purpose -to collect spam and occasional misdirected legitimate mail.
You review the contents of the Junk folder – correct any misdirected mail and delete the rest.
Nothing forces you to open the spam or read it…
The problem lies at source – the email provider that lets spam be downloaded.
Either change your settings there – if possible or as Elizabeth suggested, change your email provider…
I do agree, that to limit spam reaching your computer,(although sidelined to Junk or Tash ) a prechecker will do that, if you don’t want to change your email addess.
But comes at a cost – both money and time to setup the filters.
Hoewever – the toplisted app in TopTen Reviews – SpamFighter – does hardly any more than you can achieve by setting Outlook’s filters -It sends them to the local spam folder, thus still downloading to your computer.
In contrast MailWasher (free or pro), deletes the spam on the server and hence only good mail
gets downloaded
http://www.mailwasher.net/
Like the others, it does take some time to setup the program, but fitlering spam is easy…