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Question

Unwanted EMAILS

Feb 19, 2015 1:27AM PST

Lately I have been getting some unwanted [spam] emails from women I have never heard of. My wife thinks I have been contacting people without her knowing. I have tried to explain about spam but have been unable to explain it too her satisfaction. I have been running computers since 1970 and have never been asked to explain how this can happen!!!

Discussion is locked

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Answer
It's in the news.
Feb 19, 2015 1:59AM PST
https://www.google.com/#q=millions+of+email+addresses finds recent breaches as well as offers to buy email lists.

It's not you in about 99% of the cases. It could be your bank, our new health care system that was breached. I don't know if this is good enough but I find that I have to use the mark as spam button a lot.
Bob
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Answer
not much you can do
Feb 19, 2015 7:52PM PST

there really is not much you can do except to send them to the spam folder. If she has an email address, most likely she is getting them too. That would be easiest way to explain it.

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Answer
Could be time for a new email addy
Feb 20, 2015 7:47PM PST

I'm helping someone do this right now. I'm recommending to this person that they use their ISP's webmail feature with Thunderbird as their email client and give the address only to friends and family. For vendors and subscription type mail, I'm recommending a cloud based account such as gmail or the like. Read up about POP versus IMAP and decide which is best for your purposes but having at least two email accounts separating you from the trusted and questionable world might help some.