I am getting un-wanted emails that i am trying to stop obviously address gained by 'scraping' the net with software. The mails home page has the un-subscibe link but it just takes me on to their products page so it seems one cannot un-subscribe. I'm in UK what's the legal position and how would I find out where the emails come from [country].

I have shoved others in junk but for some reason the new mails [same company] come to my inbox. Also others which I think are connected to the same company, each one I mark junk, another arrives in in box it is same company as the home and advertising / product pages are the same. Is there anyone I could report this to?.
many thanks

bob, May 2011

There is very probably NOTHING wrong on your side.

When I mentioned virus infected computer, I did not imply in any way that yours may be compromised.


Another advise:
Never participate in any chain letters. Almost all of those are just a waiste of time and resources. The very few legitimate ones have long outlived their original intent.
Try as much as possible to never publish your address in the clear.

Common obfuscating methods:
Replace the . by DOT; a - by DASH; an _ by SCORE, UNDER or UNDERSCORE; the ampersand with an AT.

You may spell it backward. Find some leters or digits that don't appears in the address and add some of those. Tell peoples that your real address don't contain a set of characters.
ADD some ._- characters into your address.
Include a text instructing what characters to remove or change to reconstruct your address.
Usualy, any UPERCASE characters will be removed by a human poster.

Prety important: Ask all your correspondents to remove any addresses when they forward any messages. It's also a good idea to also remove any signatur that may be present.

Electro, May 2011

Thanks for the info Electro will get my son to sort it he's the computer wizard.

Bob, May 2011

There is nothing that you can realy do, apart from NEVER following any link included in any of those messages and marking those as SPAM. As you said, your address have been "scrapped" or "harvested" of the net.

The "From:" feild is ALWAYS forged. Have been the case since 1996...
Anyway, if you trace the message to it's origin, you'll get some poor soul whose computer is infected by a virus.
Final word: It's not worth the time and effort to trace the origin of those messages.


You already made a prety bad move by clicking the "unsuscribe" link, as it ONLY purpose is to validate your e-mail address, and pretend to comply with the infamous canspam act in the USA. You WILL get even MORE unsolicited e-mails now :(

It tels them that, not only there is somebody there to receive the message, but also that you actualy read the message and tend to follow links sent by total strangers.
If you read the message, there is a greater chance that you may actualy follow a buy link...
Their rentability threshold been at not even 0.00001% sale per message sent (less than 1 in 10 MILLIONS), if you buy anything you contribute in increasing the SPAM volume for everyone, worldwhide.

There is no place you can report this as the spamers who send you that junk are realy criminals and other unscrupulous entities who only want to make a quick buck by scamming the unwarys. They absolutely don't care how you feel, definitively disregard any laws, use virus infected computer abroad to send those messages,...
They probably don't reside in the UK. Are commonly related to organisation like the mafia or similar. The Rusian mafia is commonly implied. It seems that some terrorist groups or cells use that as fund raiser.


DON'T just delete those messages. Also, don't just move them to your junk folder.

If you use a webmail service, always use the "Signal as SPAM" button for those messages. In doing so, you help all other users of that service.

If you use a local application to read the mail, look for a "Mark as undesirable", "Undesirable" or similar button. It will instruct the imbeded SPAM filter about what is an unaceptable message.
Also, set it to automaticaly move marked messages and filtered messages to the junk folder. You can then quickly scan that folder to catch any false positive.

Thunderbird have a very good adaptive, trainable, SPAM filter. After a few months, it will have a success rate of about 100% at elliminating those messages.

In my case, Thunderbird's effective filtering effeciency is 100% with NO false positive over a 5 years period.

Electro, May 2011