Today I am wrestling with a question. I want to know what idiot spammer thinks I’m dumb enough to download an e-mail from someone using "spam" as part of his e-mail address. What was this moron thinking when he set up his freebie account anyway? ("Wow ‘spam’ isn’t taken…cool.") Sheesh. People like this are bad for the gene pool.
Once again, I reiterate that downloading headers FIRST is a very good thing. 99% of viruses would be stopped and offensive spam would be avoided if people would just download the e-mail header first. In other words, don’t let the e-mail software download the entire message. Tell it to download only the header. (Look in the online help if you don’t know how to set up this feature.)
When you just download headers, you receive the e-mail subject line, sender’s e-mail address, and file size. With this information, you can make a lot of educated guesses as to what you do and do NOT want to read. Then mark the messages you don’t want for deletion (so they are not downloaded to your computer).
Here are a few hints from years of deleting.
1. E-mails that are 100K or more from someone you don’t know are best deleted. They are generally viruses.
2. E-mails that are from hotmail and yahoo accounts are suspect, especially if the address has random characters and numbers in it.
3. E-mails that have Viagra, sex, girls, live and so forth as part of the subject line should be deleted. You don’t want to read the message. (Or if you do, please don’t tell me about it.)
4. E-mails from obscure foreign addresses are probably best deleted. Lots of spam comes from unexpected places.
In a nutshell, if you don’t recognize the sender’s e-mail address, it’s probably garbage. Nuke these e-mails from the server and they won’t clutter your in-box and subject your computer to malicious damage or your eyes to unwanted, offensive, or stupid marketing messages.