OK

If she doesn't know them how do they have her e-mail address?

The possibility is that the computers of people she does know have become infected with malware that "spoofs" the sender's address, most probably at random from e-mails that they have received or from their address book. OR it is just plain SPAM?

My first move would be to go to another provider and create a new e-mail account, and be VERY CAREFUL who I gave that address to. Do not post it on chat rooms or give it out to enter "competitions" or get "free gifts"..............create a separate account for that preferably with yet another e-mail provider or as a separate account........NOT a subordinate of a proper account.

You do not say what the subject matter of the e-mails is, so it is hard to tell whether it is virus or spam. Are they actually addressed to her, with her proper account name?

Some mail providers allow you to set up filter rules so that if the mail is not directly for your account it will divert it to a "spam folder" Otherwise you need to analyse the mail headers and set the local filter to kill mails with headers containing key words:

Win
Congratulations
Viagra
Penis
Loan
Consolidate
Debt
Holiday

Those are local English examples that I use of course.

As she has probably opened some of this crap, I would run Housecall from Trend Micro, and check for viruses on her machine.

Make sure that she has an up to date AV and firewall and keeps them that way. Follow the advice in various tutorials on this site on hardening the machine.

If she is getting that many she is being far too promiscuous with her e-mail address.

Where she needs to give it on a website or whatever, at least try:

[email protected]

That will fool the spambots, and anyone not intelligent enough to know what to do probably won't have anything to say that you would be interested in anyway? You need to be careful with subscriptions though, as they use mailbots, so you have to give them a "clean" and correct address. Set up an account just for this.

I think that the most important thing is that she gets a mail provider that allows filtering at source, and that these filters are set.

It can be very painful watching 1500 items of spam download over a 56.6 dial up connection



Good luck