I am sick and tired of getting countless "Pump and Dump" e-mails! Surely you have heard of them. You get a message in your inbox, often with a subject line either geared toward an interest you have, regarding a previous e-mail topic you sent out, or referencing a newsletter you once subscribed to (i.e. daily brain teaser). When you open the e-mail the first thing you see is a stock quote and then a summary about how well it's doing. Then beneath it is total gibberish. This appeared in one of my e-mails:
"silo are turn near from bases town hall accusations him united now in disagreed? know left protect read superintendent minister when very give well missile inauguration, global town hall mother food putting that would statement coast too chief chief executive up abandonment can have enough made start."

For those who don't know about this scam, those who send out the e-mails buy huge chunks of what are called "penny stocks" and then send out mass e-mails about how the stock is suppose to reach a high. If the recipient is into playing the stock market they will buy these stocks, pushing the price up. The spammers then unload their stock for a profit, seeing a return of 5.79% over a matter of a few days while the people who bought the stock as a result of a hot tip in their inbox lose 5.5% over a course of 2-3 days.

Pump and Dump scams are illegal and thank goodness I don't buy into them...but they are such a nuisance because I really think the e-mail is important until I open it

So how does one block these? Yahoo and Hotmail don't catch them. E-mail blockers don't catch them because of the use of "gibberish" as a work around. You can't block the address because it never comes from the same address twice. And no web mail provider seems to be immune to them. Suggestions anyone?

I think it is just part of having an email account. Many sites end up selling your address and some just randomly guess. I remember when I subscribed to Motley Fool. I got so many financial spam emails. The only true way to get rid of these is set your email account to only accept emails from people in your address book. It is just the nature of the email beast.

I certainly could do that on my hotmail account but I have not found a way to do it on Yahoo nor can I do it on my att.com work e-mail account. I'd have to leave the work e-mail open to all anyways but do you know where in Yahoo that option is? The only thing about only accepting e-mails from people in my address book is that I will miss out on job opportunities for my f/x work.

Georgia, I used to get these all the time, too. Plus all the other spam everybody gets. I finally got so sick of it that I started blocking the domain name every time I got spam. It took maybe 15 minutes each day, for about two weeks, but I haven't had any of those for some time now, and in fact my spam load has markedly decreased.

Well since I have not been able to figure out how to set my Yahoo options to only receive mail from people in my address book (and no-one has been able to tell me how...) I might just have to do as you suggest Catty. Thanks.