[SC-Help] Re: Giving them my email

[Don Wannit]

Mike Easter wrote:
> Erin wrote:
> 
>>I'm trying
>>to cut down on my mom's spam for her, and I can't have access to her
>>account (at hotmail) forever. Is there nothing I can do for her?
> 
> 
> I've never had a hotmail account, free or otherwise, so I have to go to
> msn to read about it.


I signed up for a free Hotmail account, and it appears that Hotmail does
have several settings of interest to pledged spam fighters.

Email goes either into your inbox or into your junk email folder,
depending on your settings.  You can also create other folders and
various filtering rules (very simple ones) to automatically sort
incoming messages into your various folders.  Not fancy, but not
bad for the price :-)

There is an "exclusive" setting for spam filtering, which is a
whitelisting feature.  It allows only messages from your "contacts"
into your inbox, others go to your junk mail folder.

Other settings for automatic spam filtering are "low" (you're
on your own), and "enhanced", which diverts suspected spam to the
junk folder based on Hotmail's rules.  Not much information on
them, but they claim that by confirming (they call it "reporting")
a suspected spam message as spam, users can help improve the spam
filtering.  Might be a large collective ham/spam database, but there
is not much information I could find in a quick look.

Another setting to be very sure to select, and which is not selected
by default, is to "Automatically suppress Internet content in
messages".  This one is found in the Options>Mail>Mail Display Settings
page.  If you don't select this, Hotmail will render images and
all that web-bug nastiness that lets the spam "phone home" to let
Sammy the Spammer know that your email address is a live one.

Off to explore the wonderful world of Hotmail some more...


-- 
Don Wannit <edb2000 -at- spamcop.net>
A paid SpamCop user since 1999