[Dancer]

How can I get less unwanted advertisements sent to my email account? For example, some say that it's geocities and that I filled out a request and that's why they're sending me this info. I never filled out any request. Can I get this stopped?

[Northwind_Dagas]

The simple answer is: No, not really.

It's hard to say how your email address got out there. It could have been posted on the web, in a forum like this one, in which it would be susceptible to spam bots which gather email addresses. You may have signed up for some newsletter with a less than reputable website, and they sold your email address to spammers. As I said, it's hard to say.

Although you will often time have a link at the bottom of spam to "opt-out" of mailings, these are seldom effective. Spammers aren't the most honest people to begin with. What often happens is that they *might* remove you from there list, however they will add your name to another list of confirmed addresses and sell it to other spammers for a premium.

Yahoo! Has some features available in their premium services to deal with spam, including throw-away email addresses.

Changing email addresses is the only surefire way to stop the spam, and event then its likely only temporary without a LOT of work.

You might consider a Gmail account, as it has some of the best built in spam filtering I've seen for free email.

[LTheobald]

As Northwind said - your best bet would probably be the built in spam filters most email providers give you nowadays. Your desktop mail app (Thunderbird, Outlook etc.) will also have these facilities built in.

There are also some extra spam tools you can get to help stop even more spam. One I used to use was called SpamPal.

One last tip for avoiding spam - Never press the "Unsubscribe" links on these spam emails. This just acknowledges that your email is valid and you get even more spam.