I have been receiving a promotion message for 'ball bearing' in my e-mail box sent by
[email protected] since January 8. This e-mail has somehow multiplied more than 100-fold and pops up about 10 times every hour when I download new messages.
I contacted the server (Postmas
[email protected]) from where the message was sent to get advice, but did not receive any. Can you tell me how to delete such junk mail? H. J. BRENNER Hong Kong 'Postmaster' e-mail addresses or the kind to which you turned for advice generally go through to mailboxes at ISPs that are monitored, if at all, by junior staff who couldn't care less if you were struck by lightning.
You must lodge a complaint with the customer services department of your ISP and at Pacific Internet. Provide them with headers of the offending e-mail, or the whole e-mail, and request that mail from that source be blocked. Pacific Internet, depending on its anti-spam policies, may warn the sender or disconnect the account.
Meanwhile, you have to manually delete all the offending e-mail in your in-box and then set up a filter - or rule, if you are using Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express - that will gather all e-mail from
[email protected] or bearing the subject 'ball bearing' and delete them automatically immediately upon downloading them. This will be an interim measure until your ISP or Pacific Internet can help you block the e-mail at the server end or solve the problem some other way.
The way you set up a filter or rule will differ, depending on the e-mail client program you use. Usually, it is under the Tools pull-down menu. The Help function will also offer some assistance.
Cynthia Leung, group manager of corporate communications at Cable & Wireless HKT, was the only reader to respond with a possible solution to the problems experienced by Nick Plant as discussed in this column last week regarding his difficulty sending e-mail from his Netvigator account.