ot can someone offer help on pc

If your e-mail browser has a filter feature, set up a couple of filters to not download it from your ISP's server.

Bill Putney (to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with "x")

There is a problem with that advice for many people: It will not allow them to open very legitimate attachments (such as jpg photos, and MS Word and Excel documents IIRC). For people who need and/or make use of legitimate attachments, that feature is equivalent to welding the doors to your car shut: Yeah - it will never be broken into, but the car would be useless.

That box being checked was a security feature that Microsoft added as the default with some of the recent Windows updates and was an over-reaction to some of the latest threats to Windows, Internet Explorer, MS Word, etc. In the very latest updates, they mercifully quit forcing that box to be checked and focused on continuing to fix the awful security vulnerabilities that they built into their products.

Many ISP's are filtering those hoax Microsoft e-mails as part of the SPAM filtering service that comes with your account - you should encourage your ISP to do the same - or get a better ISP.

Bill Putney (to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with "x")

I have Entourage and have used it extensively until I started getting the spam and virus Emails. It took forever to download the Email with the 146K attachments, although I never opened the attachments. I stopped using the Entourage and went right to Earthlink, my ISP. The Email went there first, and then downloaded onto my hard disk when I selected to download mail through Entourage. At the Earthlink site, the Email does not download onto the hard drive, and Earthlink has a virus eliminator to filter out the virus in Emails so that they are only 1K. Go to your ISP that handles your Email online and don't open your Email Program anymore until this spam and virus thing passes. Eventually the one who created this spam thing will be caught and heavily fined and put in jail for awhile.

So? Manually select them and save them to the desktop. View them there.

I didn't know you could do that - I don't use OE at home, so can't test it until Monday.

Bill Putney (to reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with "x")

You can't even select an attachment with that box checked.

accidentally

I hope so.

Until recently I had received only one of these so-called MS updates and seen more posted to the auto groups, but now I get them several times a day.

In fact, up to about a month ago I received only about 10 spam e-mail msgs a day, but suddently this rose sharply and now I might get 150 a day, so most are filtered by my Outlook Express. This 'paradigm shift' seems to have coincided with a new e-mail redirection I set up from a domain I had previously bought but not used for e-mail, but it's probably coincidence.

The real problem arises when I wish to read my e-mails on my PDA, downloaded via a mobile phone. The filters don't work (I am in touch with the programme supplier about a possible solution) and, although the message length is limited, the phone call can still last 10 mins or more longer than it should, quite an expense when I am roaming internationally { esp in the US, whose phone providers charge extortionate amounts to call the UK... ;-( }.

It's appalling.

I read somewhere that there are only about 200 sources of 'severe' spam and they are mostly known, and they are mostly in the US and Congress won't pass a law permitting their prosecution. The counter-lobby argues that such a law may infringe the freedom to advertise...

DAS

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accidentally

Well, if OE can't, you can get a competent email client that won't display HTML, and you can download real attachments without any fear.