Is your email overrun by marketing messages?

I’ve tried the separate email accounts approach (I have at least 6 of them now!) but I now get junk in all of them! The latest is messages with the heading starting “ADV” (for advert, presumably, which I have no clue as to their origins and why I’ve suddenly started receiving them). I did the “unsubscribe” bit on them but it hasn’t worked.
I too have “unsubscribed” but then the organisation starts mailing me after a period of time. Some big, supposedly reputable, companies do this.
With personal emails, so many of my friends forward “funnies” to me but make the address lists visible to all addressees – despite me repeatedly asking them to put people’s addresses in the “BCC” (blind copy) field so that we can’t see other people’s email addresses. There will always be someone who sees this as a marketing opportunity and, being personal, your details might be being given out to someone in your past personal life who you don’t want to have your contact details!
Quite a few businesses I deal with also circulate emails with other businesses’ email addresses on them, and again I tell them not to do it but they still do (breach of data protection/confidentiality??).
Competitions seem to be really bad. I’ve entered several on the ITV website and, despite not opting for communications from “third parties”, each time I’ve entered I’ve received lots of junk emails from various companies almost immediately afterwards, plus phonecalls.
I agree re company “groups” too – there are so many huge organisations these days and the last thing we want is to be bombarded with emails from each arm of the organisation.
I think too that the “surveys” approach is another ploy to send us junk mail (eg signing up to complete surveys in return for reward points/airmiles, but the surveys become more and more related to us personally and the junk mail increases again).
I’ve even stopped rushing to answer my (sole trader) business mobile ‘phone as 99% of the calls are from people wanting me to advertise with them or let them do work re Google listings (who’ve obtained my details off the internet), and they always seem to call at lunchtimes!

Genuine newsletters that you’ve actively subscribed to can still be too much. I tend to filter these and then read them a batch at a time. I’d prefer them monthly, weekly is too much.

Spam (i.e. unwanted email) – I used to have a tiny but great spam filter tool called K9 (by Keir.net). Worked brilliantly with my POP3 account as it learnt over time. It scores all your mail as a % so you only need to check the borderline scores for any ‘false positives’. It also scanned mail on your POP3 server so when you deleted spam it effectively sent an ‘undeliverable’ message to spammers. Now, believe it or not, spammers do care because the large number of people paying vast sums of money to use their services demand ‘hit’ and ‘success’ rates and want confidence that their emails are only being sent to genuine email addresses. This actually resulted in a significant decrease in the amount of spam being sent to me.

However, I’m on Blueyonder and good old Virgin decided to team up with GoogleMail. The result? K9 no longer works and the Blueyonder Spam filter is just Yes/No – so if there are any false positives you have to sift through all your spam. Because it’s Googlemail the email doesn’t bounce and so the spammers know it landed which results in even more spam.

Sometimes the simple ideas (like K9) are the best.

Service providers should all be required to provide a “BLOCK” buttom so that persistnt spammers do not get through

My domain names are with 1&1. They have a feature whereby *@yourdomain directs any email address for the domain to another email address. I have which@abc.mydomain.co.uk, (see below for explanation of ‘abc’) but I’ve never set this up as a specific email address; instead any emails that which? send me are directed to myname@mydomain.co.uk which is set up. (1&1 also have spam and antivirus checks built in.) Using this approach has helped me to identify who’s responsible for specific spam I get; because I can’t send emails using e.g. which@abc.mydomain.co.uk, the only way anyone else can obtain this email address is if there’s been some kind of security failure at which? (Don’t worry which?; no spam from you so far.) For example, every now and then I get spam from PCPRO magazine. I’ll forward the spam to them and then set up the pcpro address with 1&1 so that any future emails go straight to them! Hah! Of course I then have to log on to my pcpro account and set up a new pcpro email address.
There is a potential problem with this; once anyone knows my domain, they could use any email address for that domain to spam me. However, using another feature provided by 1&1, I can create a sub-domain, e.g. abc.mydomain.co.uk; so which@abc.mydomain.co.uk. So far this approach has worked well.
But there is a difficulty. How to send emails to which? I have a specific email address that I only use to send emails. I then have to set a replyto email address (e.g. which@abc.mydomain.co.uk) which automatically directs replies to this address.
I admit it can be complicated, but so far it has worked for me.

The only long term solution to persistent spammers is simply don’t buy from them. Simples. They will eventually get the message. As a family we dive for the “mute” button when the never ending insurance adverts and price comparison sites come on tv. As a potential customer I now no longer even bother to enquire with these offending companies. (Take not D@@@@@ L###)

I adopted the multiple email approach using yahoo mail for potential spammers, my ISP’s email service for personal correspondence and gmail for storing (by forwarding) any important emails in case my hard drive fails.

I am going away on holiday soon. How do I access my email (which.net) to clear out old messages before I depart?