Junk email

[Big Frank]

I have a Hotmail account that I use just for a couple of things and another email account that I use for everything else. I still have to check my Hotmail all the time just in case I get something other than junk. Most of the junk mail goes to the junk folder, I empty it, and repeat day after day. Sometimes I get email that says "Your Penis" is the sender. I wasn't aware my penis could reach the keyboard without my prior consent, and knowledge of the fact. Apparently my penis is up when I'm asleep. But no matter who the spam was "from" or what it was about, the majority of it came from one place, contact at rapid comprehension dot co dot uk. I'm not putting a live link here but it's plain to see what it is. I set up a filter rule to block all email from that address when suddenly I came up with a different idea. Instead of blocking the spam, I set a rule to forward it back to them, 101 times, give or take. I had a hard time counting how many times I pasted their email address in the forward to box. So far today only about half of the spam was from them. And the other half got forwarded, CCed, and BCCed to them. Maybe now they'll take me off their email list. If any of the other spammers get that bad they'll be on list from contact at rapid comprehension dot co dot uk. Let them spam each other. While they're busy doing that I'll have more time to read the forum. If you have a spam problem you can try forwarding it all to the worst offender and see how it works for you. Or just don't use crap like Hotmail that gets 99.999% spam on a daily basis.

As I was typing this I remembered what I did with snail mail when they sent me junk mail with a postage paid return envelope; put everything including catalogs and the envelope it all came in, folded up inside the postage paid envelope. They had to pay for the postage to get their junk mail back. I didn't ask for it in the first place, they shouldn't have sent it to me. With a few of the postage paid envelopes you can mix it up a bit to keep things interesting. If you find some religious group to be particularly offensive to your beliefs, send them an Adam & Eve catalog. Planned Parenthood begging for money? Send them all of the religious stuff. And send Adam & Eve the stuff you got from Planned Parenthood. I can neither confirm nor deny that I've ever done anything resembling that act, but sometimes it seems like there's a guiding hand in the universe and it delivers right to your front door. If you got a postage paid label you really hit the jackpot. You could send them a big ol' box o' rocks, or any kind of junk you wanted to get rid of. I do deny doing that, but it sounds way too familiar. My memory isn't that great so something may come back to me later. The garbage man won't take old car tires and neither will the landfill, but if someone gives you a postage paid label, slap it on that baby and say adios. That reminds me, one of my friends has a few old tractor tires sitting around.

[Pathfinder]

Cute idea, Frank, but likely fruitless. With unsolicited snail mail with return postage paid (how many do that any more?), you are correct in that the USPS makes them pay for the envelope before they can open it.

With email, however, likely your forwarded email is going to a "do not reply" type mailbox, in which case it disappears into the ether - they never see it and it has no impact on them. Best just to block them.

[Big Frank]

I thought about that too, but I think it's going to the address in the link they want you to click on. I need to check again to be sure. It seems to be working so far, but not completely. Yesterday I only got 5 spam emails IIRC and only one was from those guys. I forwarded, CCed and BCCed the rest to them 10 or 15 times apiece to them. I added another rule to the other one so it deletes everything from them too. There was nothing in the deleted folder today except one from last night, so I still don't know for sure if anything is happening other than the emails are being sent. So far today I only got 2 junk emails, one from them and one from someone else. I forwarded, CCed and BCCed them 10 times apiece to each other. If I get 2 junk emails a day instead of 20 that's good enough to satisfy me for awhile.

[Big Frank]

After I took another look at the links in some of the junk emails I found out I was just wasting my time. Those weren't the addresses I was trying to send the junk to, and when I tried sending it to the right address a couple of times they didn't exist. Maybe they did on the dark web but I couldn't forward any spam to them. And now instead of just flushing the spam folder like I used to I'm blocking everyone. It doesn't do a whole lot of good when they make up another "alphabet soup" address and send you crap from something like hbwerrgsqphg.com instead of hlwgehtyuiilre.com.