I have begun to get these emails promoting stocks. How do I stop them. The email I recieve, doesn't allow me to link to an unsubscribe. The sent from address always seems to be different as well. I have attached a copy of the email.

First off, you need to understand that "unsusbscribe" links only lead to more spam! It's the oldest trick in the book, spammers know you don't want to receive their crap, so they give you a bogus unsusbscribe link. Well, that unsubscribe link sends you to a website that they use to track who clicks that link, and, basically, if you click it, that means you got the email, you read the email, then clicked on the link -- This proves to them that your email address is active. NEVER USE THOSE UNLESS YOU KNOW THE COMPANY SENDING THEM TO YOU IS LEGIT! :D

This type of crappy behavior is not normally done with major advertisers like large online stores, but fly-by-night deals with stocks trading, OEM software, porn and random other nonsense never, ever provide a legitimate unsubscribe link - they use that link for harvesting/validating your email.

With that said, without adding a spam filter to your account, I don't think there's much you can do in this case except get a new email address, especially if you've been clicking those unsubscribe links all this time.

The bad part about email these days is that...well, even if you don't click those links, you will get spam. Studies have proven that the longer you have an email address, the more spam you will get - even if you don't even send email or post your email publicly on the web! Spammers do what are called "DHA attacks" on servers - a DHA attack is simple: someone sits on an email server and tries to send to random email addresses generated from a word list. Like...

john2006@your-email.com
bobjoan@your-email.com
someguy@your-email.com

They keep trying to send to random email addresses like that and if your mail server accepts the email, then they know the email address is good and they store it for future use. Usually the software people write to do this DHA crap is limited to finding emails with 8-10 letters/numbers before the @ sign in the email. A good way to safeguard yourself from being "found" by a DHA attack is to include special characters in your email and make the beginning of your email more than 10 characters. Like, something like "bob@your-email.com" if gonna be found quickly by a DHA. If it was bob-hates_spam@your-email.com, chances are someone ain't gonna get that. Just using something like firstname_lastname@your-email.com is really effective.

Other ways people get nailed with spam... hmmm, here's one that happens on here all the time! You publicly post your email replying to a person in a forum on the internet. People make search tools that dig through forums like this one and hunt for emails. When it finds them, guess where it goes? On a spammer's list. They validate your email with thousands of others, then trade it or sell it to spam companies and, well, you get more spam.

There are a ton of ways you can prevent ever getting spam, but once you get that first spam email, you're bound to spend the rest of your life weeding out other emails.

There are a lot of tools out there which offer spam filtering for most major email programs. SpamAssassin is one of them that comes highly recommended. I own my own website and my own mailservers, so I use SpamAssassin on my mailserver directly so spam gets flagged/tagged as being SPAM before I get it.

The only thing that sucks about using spam filters is you need to go back through and check to make sure it didn't dump legitimate emails into the spam folder. At the office, 99.1% of our email is spam (this week's statistics!), which totals up to around 100,000 spam emails per day for around 35 users... so that's roughly 3,000 spam emails per user I reject!

I hope this helps, hopefully I didn't ramble too much. I could talk about spam all day long!

PS - spam prevention. Here are two good sources with great rules that you can use to prevent spam!

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000477.htm

http://office.microsoft.com/en-au/assistance/HA011194221033.aspx

That second link is directly related to Outlook 2003 (which has a kick ASS spam filter built-in) but a lot of the things they say about how to protect yourself on public forums like this one, etc. are really good!