I know I sound paranoid. I've been using Shaw Secure, which has been slowing my system annoyingly.

But now I've noticed a flood of junk mail, more than I've every received before; plus, some popup ads, and even a phishing e-mail which Shaw just announced would be intercepted by their latest upgrade now in effect!

So I'm getting rid of it. But here's my deepest, darkest suspicion: it is Shaw, or through Shaw, that the junk mail is arriving!

Item: I recently bought some dry-powder sunscreen online, charging it to my credit card. I tried it, didn't like it, and notified the company not to send any more.

TWO DAYS later I got a sneaky snail-mail letter, handwritten envolope, "Dear xxxxxxx " (my real first name) telling me about a very similar product! It was obviously intended to make me think that a friend was making helpful suggestions discreetly, without signing the helpful hint. The tipoff: all my friends and family call me by my nickname.

Item 2: I very recently got a Paypal account. This morning I got a phishing letter, with my real name in the e-mail.

Now I realize there could be a mole in my credit card company, an another mole in Paypal, and it is not at all impossible that the very first phishing e-mail I ever got happened co-incidentally with the leak of information about what cosmetic I was in the market for, along with my legal name and address.

But I don't think so.

Anybody have any ideas?

Could the fox be guarding the henhouse?

Before you blow a gasket Think have you mad a purchase online and In your hase NOT Ticked the NO News letter third party mail box...?

Sometimes you have to do the opposite Look rather carefully/closely at the wording
and on one site I use there is a 3 box setup and its a tick 1 and untick the other 2 to not get mailed/Spam
Baffles me that ...and its on a Computer forum for the inexperienced !
If you know the source and you order again from there You know what to do and the spam will fade away
But If you do not intend going there again You may have to block the worst of the Persistant Spam ,and ignore anything in the Mail

The Cardinal Sin is to write to this site and ask to Unsubscribe to the Mail ...Thats a Big Hello I want more! Flag from you and the cycle continues (and Grows)!
When I first started surfing I asked about a "free Tshirt" offer and never got it and was up to 20 spam per day on Yahoo and it took about 3 to 5 year before I worked out how to set up the email filters to get a complete respite from the deluge (had several sites besides that first one with the same issues)
Now its about 1 or 2 per month The Yahoo emailserver filters must intercept quite a bit too ...Was totally useless a few years back

As regards Shaw secure Ask Dwights advice as Some of these companies are not so good ...There are lots of other free and strong programs out there that do the same job

In fact sign up to AOL for Free and you get a 2 GB mail box wth good spam deflection and lots more features besides...You are not getting the ISP service ...so there is NO Charge
www.aol.com/

I think you have been proved right, bedstor. I just uninstalled Shaw, installed Avast, ran it and it removed a kuang2 virus. That is a spy virus.

So it probably searched my disk for things like passwords, and intercepted my transactions with Paypal and the shop where I used my Visa card.

Shaw didn't stop that one.

Like that last sentence

Kuang2 always appears on my MacAfee firewall
Worldwide threat list at #4 Old(common) but still Annoying www.757.org/~joat/ports.php?action=view&program_no=40
Perhaps thats what you are lacking? A Firewall.
Especially if you are running Broadband Look in the wrong place on the Web an its Open Day for Nasties
PS if you never have used one before they run themselves ask you for permission before granting access Windows XP Has one but is rather poor (ok for a stop-gap..Nothing else)
and IF you have the SP2 security update installed and IE7 Its on automatically and The Phishing Site detector is in operation on IE7
There is also the Free Windows Defender antispyware program which updates every month and helps matters (in a quiet way) www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx

Just a bit of follow-up, Bedstor, may be of interest.

I read in Consumer Reports Sept 2007 issue that Trend Micro is in their opinion by far the best 'suite' -- anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-spam, ad-popup blocker, anti-phishing, and privacy-protecting system that they tested.

Not free. Costs $50 a year.

I had already dumped Shaw and installed Avast!, Spybot Search and Destroy, and AVG, ,and downloaded PC-Cillin.

The program checked for conflicts and reminded me that I had Spyware Doctor on my system that I had forgotten about! So it offered to uninstall that, which I cheerfully accepted, because I had heard that defense-system conflicts can really mess you up.

Also it warned me that I was a little short of main memory, ought it to abort itself, since it might slow down my system? (Shaw had it slowed to the rate of crawl of a very small garden slug.) I said, no thanks, just go ahead.

My system runs at quite an acceptable speed now.

So PC-Cillin is very smart.

Have to say, though, when I ran it, it only found one problem! So it seems the freeware was doing a pretty good job. Leagues ahead of Shaw.

Still, I'm glad I bought PC-Cillin, because it's smart and integrated.

Glad to hear that (and you have found a happy medium)

Even I, when I was starting out would install several programs together and I Had a spyware problem ...the "cause" some were alleging that other programs were faulty due to "signatures" detected In other words "Conflict Wars!!"
So the secret to good antivirus and antispyware housekeeping ...Keep it Good and to a minimum
On a UK computer forum a member has posted
an excellent guide to setting up the Anti Nasty defences
Why not give it a glance and you can tidy up your defence?

Also some handy items on this site (page #2) Worth saving to Favorites