My email now is filled with all of these scamming individuals who are looking for money. HELP!?

Every third email is from Nigeria or some other foreign country and spinning on how I just won or will win something or more money if I just send them my personal information? How do I get these to stop other than sending them to SPAM? I don't know anyone in any other country, nor do I email anyone outside of the US! Where does this come from?

My email now is filled with all of these scamming individuals who are looking for money. HELP!?
They somehow are able to obtain email addresses from all over the Web. It's not personal, but we all leave tracks browsing the Net.





You'll have to keep sending them to spam.
Reply:Actually this scam started as early as the 1920's, read about it here: http://www.snopes.com/crime/fraud/nigeri...


http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer...





How to fight back:





#1: Yahoo has a spamguard filter, but only if multiple users report an address as spam will it be treated as such by the filter.





You have a personal list for blocking addresses in spam options. Anything you mark as spam in Mail classic will be added to that list, in New Yahoo mail adding addresses to the list has to be done manually. If you ever receive anything from those addresses in the future, it will be deleted automatically, you won't even notice when you got some more crap from them. One problem though: the list of blocked addresses is limited to 500 and spammers often change their address. So you must sometimes delete some of the older blocked addresses to make room for new ones.





Go to this link where everything is explained in detail:


http://help.yahoo.com/us/tutorials/mail/...





#2: The Federal Trade Commission (www.ftc.gov) is supposed to help you eliminate spam mails. Forward spam to: spam@uce.gov, in the subject line enter something like "unsubscribe link results in more spam", "unwanted spam message", "no unsubscribe link" or something similar.





When the FTC gets your mail, they will look into the matter and when they find out who the spamming source is, they will take legal actions.





http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/edcams/sp...





#3: Check Mailwasher, it helps to eliminate spam from your inbox...





Set up your email account(s) in MailWasher and hit the "Check Mail" button. It then downloads all new message headers and displays message details alongside each one (priority, subject, from, to, etc.). Any email that MailWasher considers to be spam is highlighted for easy sorting.





Two checkboxes are located next to each message header: "Delete" and "Bounce". If you click "Delete" the email will be marked for deletion, click "Bounce" and the mail will be marked for bouncing - a fake "address not found" email will be sent to the sender. Once you have decided what to bounce and delete, click "Process Mail" to get it done and your mail client launched for downloading all accepted emails.





MailWasher has a "blacklist" and a "friends list" to enter good and bad email addresses. Addresses in the blacklist are marked for deletion, and addresses in the friends list will be marked as okay. Filters can be set to increase MailWasher's effectiveness. You can have email addressed to "undisclosed recipients" automatically deleted and bounced for example.





Note: the program is free but limited to one email account. MW Pro supports multiple mail accounts.





http://www.mailwasher.net/