How-To Geek

How-To Geek

Stopping Obnoxious MSN / Windows Live Messenger Spammers

Have you been bombarded with spammers on Live Messenger telling you to check out some Look9683 spammer site? The good news is that you can completely block them, but sadly they won’t actually feel physical pain.

If you aren’t sure what we’re talking about… then you probably aren’t using Messenger:

The first time you receive a spammer message like this, you will be prompted with an option to block messages from unknown senders, which is exactly what you want to do. The problem is that if you don’t choose this option the first time, you won’t get the same option again.

 

Normally if you choose block, you’ll be notified that this blocks everybody who is not on your allow list. As far as I’m concerned, that’s just the way I like it.

If you’ve mistakenly or purposely chosen to allow on the earlier screen, you can still block all unknown users—you’ll just need to take a trip to the Options panel.

Here you’ll want to check the box for “Only people on my Allow List can see my status and send me messages”. Then you can setup your Allow list if you want, or block other people.

If you are using Pidgin to access your Windows Live / MSN Messenger / Hotmail / Whatever MS re-named it as today account, you can go to Tools \ Privacy:

Then choose the account in the “Set privacy for” drop-down, and choose “Allow only the users on my buddy list” in the lower drop-down.

This will stop those ridiculous spammers directly in their tracks.

This article was originally written on 06/23/09 Tagged with: Other, Privacy and Security, Security, Vista, Windows 7

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Comments (4)

1. June 23, 2009 2:01 am
   

   Tyler

   I’ve never had one of these before, however I have had people on my contact list signing up for various sites which claim to reveal who’s blocked you, at the same time stealing your username and password, and every so often signs them in with “BLAH.com Find out who’s blocked you!” about 10 times. Then you have all the viruses, which sends loads of messages to everyone on your contact like with “OMG Is this you naked in this picture?” and a site which looks similar to Flickr, downloading a file and then installing virus onto your computer.

2. June 23, 2009 1:01 pm
   

   PetFoodz.info

   The way I tackle this problem is with a plugin to MessengerPlus .. If you are already a plus user simply add the WLMSafe plugin and you are good to go.. Links will be reported and with any luck they will be shutdown.. Most messages you will not even see..

3. July 15, 2009 4:38 am
   

   Graham Armitage

   What if the person is one of your friends but there account has been hijacked by the spammers somehow?

4. October 18, 2010 11:05 pm
   

   Stephanie

   What i want to know is how this happens:

   >>say i have a friend on msn with the email “mynamehere_123@hotmail.com”

   >>I get a spam message from someone with the email “mynamehere123@hotmail.com” (no underscore, but same name otherwise)

   Is there a way that someone can find all of my contact’s emails to try to trick me?