I changed my password this morning and the deluge slowed to a trickle. Coincidence?
Questionable. They don’t need your password to spam you, only your address. With your password, they could and would do much more damage.
My junk email file has been getting two or three emails almost every day from Trump organizations.
Staight to delete, I don’t want to even peek.
I’ve been getting this too. I’ve had an att.net email account for years, and hardly ever got spam. In the past week or so I get as many as ten a day, most from variations on the same address. I use Thunderbird to read my emails, and it’s pretty good at tagging them as junk mail and blocking any links or attachments. The ones it misses I tag as junk mail, which I presume will improve the identification system.
6-8 weeks ago, for about one week, there were spam emails getting through the gmail filter (I use gmail pretty much exclusively) which was unusual. It persisted for about one week, making me speculate something was up at Google or there was an uptick in volume of spams overall.
I noticed this because I was getting email notifications on my phone, and so many of them were spams. Which historically has almost never been the case.
Makes me wonder if it is somehow connected to cyber warfare as practiced by Putin’s team, in the run-up to the Ukraine invasion. I have no proof, but would be interested to see if there is any connection at all, or just coincidence.
I did notice an uptick of spam in the past few days, so I ran some statistics on my spam folder for this year. Turns out that the first ten days of January and February were relatively high-volume spam days, with 20 to 50 spam messages received each day. The latter part of January and February were a bit quieter, with 5 to 19 spam messages per day. But the beginning of March has been relatively quiet, with 5 to 19 spam messages per day. Despite the lower overall volume of spam, more of it seems to be making its way past my filter. Today, for example, I’ve got 16 spam messages so far, and half of them landed in my inbox rather than my junk folder. By contrast, on a normal day I usually see only a couple spam messages in my inbox.
For reference, I run my own IMAP server and filter using SpamAssassin, which uses a Bayesian learning system to classify junk mail.
I’ve been getting a ton of spam lately at my account that I only use for bills (I too run my own email server). It’s very annoying because I turned off spam filtering for that account, since I never got spam on it and I needed to not miss bills and stuff.
But I re-financed my mortgage last fall and I think one of the companies involved got my secret address out there and it’s secret no more.
So for about a month or more ending on Friday, I was receiving up to ten spam emails daily to a legacy att.net email address but that seems to have stopped abruptly over the weekend. Perhaps they updated their filters?
Oh, and one of the annoying things about some of the spam emails I’ve been getting lately is that somehow they are past-dated. Thunderbird will show that I have unread emails, and I have to scroll up the listing to find ones that are shown as having been received as far as a week back.
Okay, I just checked my gmail account and holy shit was there a ton of it or what? Usually it’s just a few per day–I do check every week or so usually just to see what’s up but gmail dumps the spam after 30 days and it was well over 3K spam emails in there today! And apparently a bunch of people who can’t spell and insist on putting 27,000 emojis in the subject line really want to fuck me. Or have me fuck them, it’s not completely clear.
So yeah, there’s a spam deluge going on for me right now. Yikes.
Ironically, the gmail account I use as a spam catcher has no spam in it. Weird.
I don’t use Yahoo directly but my ISP outsources their email to Yahoo. I used to get occasional spam on that account but there hasn’t been anything in months (other than annoying advertising from actual companies that I do business with – note to Air Canada Aeroplan: shut the fuck up already! I don’t want to find out every second goddam day how I can earn extra miles. I don’t want to go to Europe. Fuck off.).
It’s definitely been ages since I’ve received email from “old girlfriends” who have developed a sudden need to get fucked, and even though I’ve never heard of them have nevertheless singled me out for that purpose. There were hundreds of them at one point, but they seem to have given up on me. I also have a Gmail account and there’s no spam there either, but I only access it through Outlook so I may not see stuff that’s being filtered.
People laugh when I give them my AOL address. But that’s the reason I still have it all these years later. Their spam filter catches virtually all the junk and I just empty it once a day or so. But, like Kayaker, I might get 20+ a day for a week and then 1 or 2 a day for the next month.
Who is going to bother spamming AOL?
I have a hotmail acct that used to get maybe a handful a week. Since Xmas it’s been 2-3 dozen per day No I don’t open any of them but many have the same subject line (& possibly first line in the email - as much as I can see in limited preview), yet when I hover over the sender, they have different (fake) ‘from’ addresses. I’m shocked! :
Likely they’re assuming that elderly people are hanging on to an AOL account rather than dealing with a new system.
Possibly related? Cyber attacks are particularly high lately: