june wrote:

I am having trouble with unwanted emails. I keep all virus
protection and firewalls up to date but still lots come through. I
am down to about 20 a day!!!

I have followed all of the recommendations to block SPAM. But this
appears only to be possible by placing the junk mail in the blocked
senders list.
As I interpert the block senders list it is to place addresses in
there that you do not wish to send email to. I have been using this;
and it has reduced some traffic.

Actually, it's to contain addresses or domains from which you do not wish to
receive mail, but it's fairly ineffective because the sender address of spam
changes so frequently. Why would you want to prevent yourself from sending
mail TO someone. That's fairly weasy to do. Just don't include the address
in a recipient field when you compose it.

The emails causing the problems are the ones I am receiving. Unwanted
emails, I just wish that I could block these.

The email address in the 'to' section is not mine its a scramble of
alpha's and then the rest of my email address, or not my email
address at all. Or it states that the receipient cannot accept my
email because of XZY. I do not have any contacts in my address book
for the simple fact of viruses.

This sounds like you're receiving non-delivery reports. Current practice
for spammers is to hijack the addresses of people like yourself (and myself,
for that matter) and then use the addresses as the sender addresses when
they send their crap. Often the recipient lists they use contain a lot of
bogus addresses and since those addresses don't exist, the servers that
receive them generate non-delivery reports back to the address they perceive
as the sender address - yours. You didn't send the message, the spammer
did, but it appears to have come from you, so you get the bounce-back.
There's little that can be done about it. Sometimes you can filter some of
the bounces out using rules, but NDR messages are special and often don't
contain enough information the rules engine can see to take that approach.
It's possible an add-on antispam program like Norton Antispam or SpamBayes
(free from http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/) would do a better job of
filtering such messages.

I do not wish to change my email address as it has been in use for
many years and only since going onto broadband recently has the issue
with the quantity of SPAM occurred.

One way to avoid getting SPAM is to never, EVER put your address in a public
location on the Internet, like these newsgroups, Yahoo! Groups, MySpace, or
web pages. However, that doesn't protect you from having your address
harvested from a friend's computer because your friend is too naive to
properly protect his PC, and once one spammer gets your address, other will
get it too, because a LOT of spammers actually make their money not from the
junk mail they send, but by the sale of the mail address lists they harvest.
I once saw a picture of the relationships between the various spammer and
they are all fairly connected to each other.
--
Brian Tillman