Why shouldn't I use the "Report Spam" or "Junk" button?

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I was under the impression that if you blocked a sender in Outlook, it would only block them locally on your machine, not on your ISP's servers. So it wouldn't make any difference to that sender's attempts to send their newsletter to other recipients. Am I right?

I've had problems with unsolicited email coming from legitimate companies that I've had dealings with (e.g., ordered one thing online from them) but never requested to get their newsletter. It turns out that they automatically subscribe you to their newsletter (without telling you) if you buy one thing from them. After a while of getting annoyed by the newsletter, if you made note of your login id and password which you had to create in order to order the item, you can log back into their website and go change your settings so you no longer receive the newsletter. But I find it annoying to have to create all these accounts to manage separate delivery options for all sorts of things. I wish all e-commerce companies would let you order things from them just as anonymously as if you walked into a bricks & mortar store and bought it with your credit card. The CC company gets your payment info, but the store you bought it from doesn't get your address and can't spam you with advertising for more products of theirs.

The final category of annoying email that I get is political junk mail. I have no idea how my email address got on some Democratic Party mailing list, but it did. I'm a Democrat so it's not entirely out of the question that I might have given my email address when registering for a dinner fundraiser for John Kerry or something. But I've asked repeatedly since then for them to take me off their mailing list. Problem is, there are a bunch of different Democrat organizations and they all share their mailing lists with each other. And if you get taken off one, they'll get it back again from some other that originally got their list from the parent organization when your name was on it. And on and on it goes. It seems to be impossible to completely eradicate my email address from all of their records. And some of them don't even include an "unsubscribe" link, which I consider unconscionable.

I'm so irritated about the amount of spam I get. Like you, it's almost 90% of my mail. Even though my gmail has a great spam filter, I still have to open the spam folder and make sure that nobody accidentally got marked as spam by someone else (exactly what you explained NOT to do). So, being responsible, I scroll down through the list of 30 to 40 per day rather than just blindly emptying the folder,and hate that I have to start my day being assaulted with the bad spelling and tasteless subject lines. Recently many of them have begun to say they are from me. Really annoying. Why can't they be blocked by the server?? After being marked as spam, let's say, 1000 times, couldn't they automatically be blocked?

I use Incredimail for my e-mail, and they have a block sender & bounce to sender option. It seems to work on my receiving spam from all the spam I get from places I did not request mail from.

This is a reply to what Claude said in December. Yes, yahoo has a 'block Address' function but the only block 100 addresses. Unfortunately, you start receiving it again after that and have to erase the list and start a new one. The spammers change their IP addresses/domain/websites, whatever, so often that by the time the list is full they are not using those old addresses anyway.

I have tried to get some of my friends to be responsible and not just hit the spam button if they do not like what they are getting.

My ISP is Orange. To avoid any problems with infected e mails or junk, i log into the orange website and open my e mails from there. I can tick all to clear all e mails or untick the one's i want, which, when i open outlook only brings in the e mails i unticked..brilliant....

Here's another twist to the reporting of spam: I receive MANY a spam email where the sender has spoofed my own email address as the sender. When it arrives in my inbox, it looks as if it's coming from either my specific address or the info@ address on my website. The difference? They usually have no time/date stamp.

My hosting provider tells me that if I mark those as spam, it will mark ME as a spammer -- not what I want for sure. So, I just have to exercise that good 'ole delete button.

I also use a program called MailWasherPro from FireTrust -- it gives you a preview of mail on your server before you download it into your Outlook or other email program. You can use MailWasherPro to mark as spam, delete and/or bounce (send a message that this was sent to an invalid address) each message in your queue before they hit your actual inbox. It wasn't free, but not expensive either. And it saves me a lot of time in cutting the crap before it takes up bandwidth/time to download on my machine.

Leo - Your comments assume that by submitting emails as spam, a new filter is being created for many different users. Perhaps this is the documented way that these services work. However, what if by submitting emails as spam, a filter is being created that is customized to me and only me. In other words, my improper categorization of a newsletter about turkeys as spam will result in a filter that weeds out content that is sent to me and relates to turkeys , but your filter continues to send you content relating to turkeys.

I read every word you said. is hotmail.com just behind the times or am I missing sdomething? I get junk mail over and over and can't block the idiots. thank you for your time.

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