I have been using optus broadband for few years now, for the past couple of years my inbox is absolutely bombarded with spams telling me various ways to increase the population for this country. I phoned, emailed, wrote letters to optus telling them they need get off their backside and filter all these spams, the standard response (always from our subcontinental friends) is optus can't filter all spams blah blah blah, why there is no spams on gmail or yahoo ? I just can't get through the brick wall. I know can download the emails to outlook and it seems to filter some, but I like to check the emails on the optus mail server throughout the day. What other broadband providers people are happy with ?
Fed up with spams in optus mail
- Thread starter oasis1frog
- Start date
You need a broadband provider (ISP) or you don't have an internet connection
Let's not go back to dial-up!Woah, I should've phrased my post better. Why do you want to use an ISP-provided email ie. [email protected]? Why not go for a gmail addy?
My family is on optusnet and signed up to the optusnet email account... but I refused to. Now they are getting quite a bit of spam, and worse still, they can't change their ISP easily because their email account is with optusnet and it's too hard to change it with all their family/friends.
My family is on optusnet and signed up to the optusnet email account... but I refused to. Now they are getting quite a bit of spam, and worse still, they can't change their ISP easily because their email account is with optusnet and it's too hard to change it with all their family/friends.
I was with Optus Cable and got lots of spam. Moved to Telstra , no spam. I am Bigpond Wireless now and still no spam.
Peter
Peter
Levels of spam is not dependent on ISP - it's all about how many sites/companies who get a kick out of on-selling your email addy that you register with, or how many forums/blogs etc that you leave your email addy on for the world to see (and harvest).
I'm with optus and this works fine for me .. so if you want to stay with optus here's my 2 cents:
- create a new alias email address via https://memberservices.optuszoo.com.au/user_management/add/
- create a new gmail account, and in Settings -> Forwarding, specify your newly created optus email address, also set it to keep a copy of messages (see below)
- optionally, setup a secondary gmail account, for all online subscriptions, newsletters, forums etc and configure it to forward to optus as per the last step.
- gmail has excellent spam filtering that continually 'learns' from the actions of it's users
- access your email either via optus webmail, the gmail website, your 3g phone (browse to m.google.com/mail then download the app - this is brilliant btw), or good old outlook tied to your optus account.
- hand out your optus addy only to close friends, and only if you don't want to use gmail to read your mail .. hand out the gmail address/es as appropriate .. try not to leave it on any website that google can index of course.
- if you ever need to for whatever reason, you can easily change your secondary (gmail) address while keeping the primary optus one constant - theoretically it should never receive spam as it should never be published anywhere.
- if you want to check how 'spammable' your current email addy is then just google "[email protected]" and find out
all this sounds convoluted but is fairly quick and easy and only takes a few minutes, with the exception of re-subscribing to newsletters/forums etc, which it sounds like you're planning on doing anyway.
hope this helps
I'm with optus and this works fine for me .. so if you want to stay with optus here's my 2 cents:
- create a new alias email address via https://memberservices.optuszoo.com.au/user_management/add/
- create a new gmail account, and in Settings -> Forwarding, specify your newly created optus email address, also set it to keep a copy of messages (see below)
- optionally, setup a secondary gmail account, for all online subscriptions, newsletters, forums etc and configure it to forward to optus as per the last step.
- gmail has excellent spam filtering that continually 'learns' from the actions of it's users
- access your email either via optus webmail, the gmail website, your 3g phone (browse to m.google.com/mail then download the app - this is brilliant btw), or good old outlook tied to your optus account.
- hand out your optus addy only to close friends, and only if you don't want to use gmail to read your mail .. hand out the gmail address/es as appropriate .. try not to leave it on any website that google can index of course.
- if you ever need to for whatever reason, you can easily change your secondary (gmail) address while keeping the primary optus one constant - theoretically it should never receive spam as it should never be published anywhere.
- if you want to check how 'spammable' your current email addy is then just google "[email protected]" and find out
all this sounds convoluted but is fairly quick and easy and only takes a few minutes, with the exception of re-subscribing to newsletters/forums etc, which it sounds like you're planning on doing anyway.
hope this helps
I have been using the optus email since I signed up, found yahoo mail couple of years ago but it was not very user friendly, then came across gmail few months ago, very happy with it and started using it. It will take time to move all my optus email to gmail, but doing it now.
Thanks guys for other suggestions, I will definitely try them out. Optus is not doing it's job to improve the spam filtering, it is very frustrating to complaint numerous times and getting the same old response - "there is nothing we can do about it !"
I'm with hotmail mostly, and have been using Mozilla mostly. Internet Explorer 8 is not much different (slightly faster) but I prefer the Mozilla interface.
Today I opened the browser and there were 8 spams.
Quick scan down list to see if one was actually from someone I needed to hear from, then;
Select all, then press delete.
4 seconds of my day.
Today I opened the browser and there were 8 spams.
Quick scan down list to see if one was actually from someone I needed to hear from, then;
Select all, then press delete.
4 seconds of my day.
I don't have an optus account to check with, but you should be able to set your optus email to forward to your new gmail account.
That way you don't even need to "move" anything, or get people to change the email address they use. Just only ever reply from your gmail address, and over time most people will work it out. After a month or three just email the stragglers that still use the optus address, and then turn off the forwarding.
(or set up a filter on gmail to put all your optus fwds into a label, and leave the forwarding enabled in case long lost friends try mailing you)
That's how I've always moved address.
I run my own mail server out of a rented server in the US using
spam assassin on my own domain.
This would not be everyone's cup of tea but since I can create any number
of mail aliases.
Friends get my primary address and when I need to register an email I create
another one for the purpose. ie somersoft@<domain>.net.
Then if I start getting spam addressed to that address I know who the guilty party is..
spam assassin on my own domain.
This would not be everyone's cup of tea but since I can create any number
of mail aliases.
Friends get my primary address and when I need to register an email I create
another one for the purpose. ie somersoft@<domain>.net.
Then if I start getting spam addressed to that address I know who the guilty party is..
Similarly,
On gmail you can use "+<anything>" on your email address, in much the same way. And dots don't count in gmail addresses, so you can use any variation on your username with dots.
If your email is [email protected] then the following all would go to your account:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
etc.
So you can make up aliases as you need them using the + sign.
I've never bothered with it because despite the large amount of mail I get, I see about 1 spam a week. Quite often I'll see a spam message in the inbox when I wake up but by the time I get to work it's been identified and removed without me even needing to hit 'report spam'.
Murtagh, this is a very good idea, but I couldn't find how to do this in optus mail. I guess from now now I will use gmail carefully & not sign up for everything !
No problem .. I went looking for you the other night and tonight .. it seems that Optus don't offer mail forwarding, according to a few posts on Whirlpool from 2006. I tried poking around the actual Optus site, but without an account to log into there's not much I can see.
Good luck!
