? for Cox e-mail users.

[O]

Questions;
Do you get abnormal amounts of spam?
Do you get e-mail from yourself? Sent from your e-mail address.
Do you get "ReturnedMail Notification" for e-mail that you didn't send?

Yes to everything for me.
For months I have been sending the e-mails sent from my address to myself along with the Returned Mail Notification to "[email protected]" only to get a form letter reply saying nothing could be done.
Now, I am not an expert but I can follow a message header to see where the e-mail is coming from.
Tonight was the first time I was able to actually talk to a person in their security department.
I think someone in tech support screwed up by giving me the number. The first thing they asked me was how I got the number and they didn't seem happy about it.
Long story short, I was lectured about phishing, spam, viruses, blah, blah. Once again, I'm not exactly an idiot and I don't appreciate being treated like one.
Condensending I don't need.
I asked to speak to a supervisor. The supposed "supervisor" came on and was literally yelling at me. The only way I could get a word in was when he took a breath. I asked who I could speak that was his supervisor and was told to call back during normal business hours east coast time.
As a customer I am so fed up. If I treated a client the way I was treated tonight I would probably be fired.
I have been looking for the e-mail addy of the CEO of Cox but I haven't found it yet.
I have been a subscriber of Cox Internet for eight plus years, we are talking thousands of dollars here. What does a person have to do to get a little customer service? Or a tad bit of respect?
Am I wrong to try and get answers or am I just PWI?

 

[jw7]

Cox has a pretty effective spam blocker. Log in to support.cox.com, do a search on "spam" and it will take you to the spam resource center. Log in - sign up for spam blocking, and that should do the trick.

 

[O]

I have so many "anti" programs on my computer, it's stupid, including Nortom AntiSpam.
Enabling the Cox anti spam just means I will never see the problem, it will not correct it.
I have used the Cox anti spam in the past and personally I prefer Norton.
No offense, jw7 but you said the same thing their customer support said.
I want better results.

 

[Chaz]

I have so many "anti" programs on my computer, it's stupid, including Nortom AntiSpam.
Enabling the Cox anti spam just means I will never see the problem, it will not correct it.
I have used the Cox anti spam in the past and personally I prefer Norton.
No offense, jw7 but you said the same thing their customer support said.
I want better results.

Well untill they re-write the SMTP protocol we are stuck with spam. The Cox Spam will label the spam or delete it for you.

I am not sure what exactly you expect to happen. Not seeing the problem is pretty much the only effective solution we have.

I have the Cox spam filter turned on in my Cox mailbox but I still get 5-10 messages a day that get through.

 

[O]

Yeah, I guess I am asking to much.

 

[jw7]

I have so many "anti" programs on my computer, it's stupid, including Nortom AntiSpam.
Enabling the Cox anti spam just means I will never see the problem, it will not correct it.
I have used the Cox anti spam in the past and personally I prefer Norton.
No offense, jw7 but you said the same thing their customer support said.
I want better results.

No offense taken, O. But fighting Cox on this is going to be a losing battle. Once a spammer has your email addy, game over.

For example, with Cox Spam Blocker, I will never get an email with "Viagra" in the subject - so spammers work around this by sending "Hey jw7- need some v1agra?" There is only so much filtering an ISP can do before the spammers figure a workaround.

The best defense against spam is to never let the spammers get your email in the 1st place. This means never posting your email on a message board or website, and not getting on email distribution lists that are forwarded to a bazillion people.

One option might be to create a new email addy (Cox gives you 5-7 or so I believe) and give that to family/friends/trusted websites. Have a yahoo or hotmail account that you can use for registering on websites that you may not trust.

Even better is mailinator. When a website asks for an email address for one-time registration, if you put in anyname@mailinator.com (anyname can be "joe", "frank", whatever you want) it will create a temporary account once the inbound message arrives, let you check the mail, then blow away the account in a few hours, never to be seen again.

 

[O]

You're right, it's just frustrating when you see your own address being used.
I have begun using my gmail account whenever I sign up for something.
I will have to check out mailinator, sounds interesting.

 

[Chaz]

The problem with Cox is they are so big. Once they made their own e-mail and changed over from @home it was great for a while. Then the spammers set in. Many times they just send spam out to 'anything' @cox.net. All big ISPs have the same problem.


Best idea is to get a domain and create your own e-mail and be guarded with who you hand it out to.


Spam sucks, there is no disagreement there.


Also remember www.bugmenot.com. For places you have to register you can lookup the site and they will give you a login.

 

[Kel Varnsen]

I was looking around the Cox site and it looks like they block emails from certain ports, but they must use other filters, too, right?

I ask because I've noticed that a lot of the spam I get comes from "people" who use only their first name. I've had two legitimate emails get sent to my spam folder because they are from a company that uses the [email protected] format. Is it possible that that is what's causing this?

 

[Covert Rain]

It's almost impossible to prevent your email from reaching a spammer. Eventually it will. I use Spam Bully. I love that program. Not only does it autofilter but it also punishes spammers by responding to their spam X 10.

 

[dreamcastrocks]

To combat spam, you really need more than one email address.

One email address that is dedicated to just friends and family only. You cannot use this email address for any websites at all. As soon as you register your email address on almost any site, someone can sell you email address to the highest bidder, and then they can sell it, etc.

You need a 2nd/3rd/4th addresses to sign up for websites, giveaways, etc.

 

[Duckjake]

Do you get e-mail from yourself? Sent from your e-mail address.
Do you get "ReturnedMail Notification" for e-mail that you didn't send?

Those are weird. I get them once in awhile and have never figured out what the deal is.

Used to worry that the "returned mail notification" was evidence that someone was using my computer to send bulk emails, which has been reported as a problem, by some pc articles. But I never could find anything to substantiate that so I just ignore them now.

 

[Chaz]

Those are weird. I get them once in awhile and have never figured out what the deal is.

Used to worry that the "returned mail notification" was evidence that someone was using my computer to send bulk emails, which has been reported as a problem, by some pc articles. But I never could find anything to substantiate that so I just ignore them now.

It just means someone was using your address as the from address for spam.

People can send e-mail and say they are anyone.

 

[devilalum]

I redirect my email from cox to gmail.

Works great.

 

[SweetD]

To avoid as much spam as possible, set up one email address to use only for signing up for things online. like [email protected] this way if you need to regestire on a site to confirm and email address you can just log into the web client for outlook http://webmail.west.cox.net and delete/check the mail instead of it going to your computer's email box. Then you can just use your regular email address for porn and skip all the other crap.