I am now getting upwards of 100 spam emails a day. 99% of them are from senders I have already identified as spam, as they go directly into my spam folder (or some algorithm on the email system is doing that, but I thought those kinds of algorithms would just refuse to deliver them to me at all, no?). Maybe 3 or 4 a week are showing up in my In box, which is certainly manageable.
Here is my general understanding of how this got going: some time last year, I clicked on a survey because I wasn’t careful enough and it happened to coincide with something I had actually bought. OK, my bad. So someone out there now had my email address as a live person who might be tricked. They started selling that address to spammers. Even though none of them ever got another click off of me, the volume of spam emails keeps growing. I see repeats several times a day of many of these spams from different addresses, some similar to other addresses, others quite different.
Every so often a real message ends up in the spam folder, and these are nearly always emails I want to get. The only way I can be reasonably sure of finding these is to go through my spam folder and click each spam as Read, and that way I will catch the very occasional one that is not actual spam. This was reasonable when I only had a few per day. Now I’m thinking this may be a mistake, that clicking a spam as Read sends something back to the spammer encouraging them to continue sending. But without clicking them as Read, it’s almost impossible to know how far to go back in checking the spam folder to be sure I haven’t missed any real messages.
Would it be a good idea to set my spam folder to delete contents after 24 hours instead of 7 days? I would have to be diligent about checking every single day lest I miss something important, and I’m not sure I can do that.
As I suggested in the title, I’d like this thread to be a general discussion about spam email, and how people deal with it, and if they have any tips or tricks for reducing its impact instead of just watching it grown like mold.
Have you tried creating rules for incoming messages?
I use my throwaway Yahoo account to sign up for “non-essential” stuff like loyalty programs, etc. So that address is likely to get massive amounts of spam.
Yahoo is terrible about identifying spam, probably because they’re pushing a paid version with added features.
I thought I’d see if I could use rules to identify key words in the subject line to get spammy emails deleted. I created a rule that anything with “congratulations, you have won” is spam, and it gets sent to trash. It helps, but I still get a few slip through.
No, I haven’t tried rules for spam. I can try that, but I wonder if there is any difference in the effectiveness or efficiency of rules depending on the interface one is using. For example, my email is through comcast, so I use their native comcast dot net interface. I wonder if other interfaces, like Outlook or other mail programs, might have a more robust rule mechanism.
I just realized that I can’t do a filter rule about the subject contents or the contents for most spams, especially the most persistent ones, because usually neither of those things is in actual text. The subject field is some kind of code that looks like text until you click on it, and the contents of the spams, including what looks like text, are just images.
Who is your email provider? My understanding is that all the major providers (Gmail, Yahoo, etc.) filter most spam before it reaches your account. I have email accounts with three major providers and seldom receive more than one or two spam messages per month.
I got tired of fighting spam so I have two email addresses. One is for general use on the internet (SDMB, signing up for this or that, airlines and so on). The other is strictly for family and friends. They both drop in the same inbox (no need to log out and back in). All the family and friends email is shunted to a family and friends folder with one simple rule.
The family and friends folder has been almost devoid of spam.
The other inbox gets spam and that I still battle with but mostly have under control. Of course, there is always some new crap that gets through. I just have to be zealous in marking spam as spam every time I see it.
I just went to a forum on Comcast/Xfinity, that shows that I am far from the only one of their customers having this problem, and that they have no solution beyond me trying to write effective filters. Filters which only work on text. I left them a message anyway, I’ll see if they offer any more help.
This spam wave might be good motivation to move to a standalone email provider like gmail or hotmail. One problem with using your ISP’s email is that you’re tied to their service. If you use another ISP or move to an area without Comcast, you may lose email access. Migrate your email to a different service and leave all that spam to your comcast address behind.
Years ago, when the Internet was still a baby, I had EarthLink (which started out as MindSpring) as my service provider. Their email had an option that worked like this: if you weren’t in my address book, your email went to my spam filter. The sender would get a bounce back email, saying that if you wanted to get in touch with me, reply to the bounce back. If you did, I would get an email from EarthLink saying that OP@whateveremail was trying to get in touch, and a “click here” feature to allow me to add them to my address book, and receive that, and future, emails.
I would gladly use something like that again, of it was an option. I’m not sure why that didn’t catch on, since it basically eliminated spam.
I’ve got a Gmail now, which gets virtually no spam, and Yahoo, which is the absolute worst at filtering spam.
Thanks, these are good points. In my occasional bouts of considering whether to change my ISP that is something I didn’t consider, losing my email address. So it’s probably a good idea to get out in front of it by getting a different email now. It seems like a very daunting prospect, but I guess it’s doable.
Okay, so I didn’t know that Hotmail was actually Microsoft, and now it is labeled as Outlook.com, although I guess they are continuing Hotmail.com for existing accounts? Anyway, does anyone want to recommend some maverick, not-huge-monopoly based email system, that does well at blocking spam? I’d like to look at one or two of those, just for contrast if nothing else.
Also, free is good but not absolutely required if it meets my needs, and I need to be able to easily transfer my archived email folders and contents.
I have them as well and their built-in spam filter works okay for me. I just checked; my spam folder contains 115 messages since last emptied plus three more bits of obvious spam in my normal folder.
I don’t do anything to encourage spam mail; it just seems to ebb & flow on its own. My spam mail is currently at high tide and should slow back down eventually.
Interesting. My broadband ISP outsources their email to Yahoo but with their own domain name, and I get virtually no spam these days. In fact I can’t remember the last time I got a spam email, and I used to get tons of it. Either they’re getting much better at filtering it out, or generally improved internet email security is helping, although the latter wouldn’t explain why you or the OP are getting so many.
Back in the day when I was getting a lot of spam, I used a separate program to scan incoming emails on the server and delete spam right off the server, so my email client never even saw it. Spam was identified through a rather extensive set of rules that I developed over time, which also included outright banning of certain ranges of IP addresses like those from certain problematic foreign countries. Occasionally I’d look at the log and there would be hundreds of junk emails in there.
By “spam” of course I’m referring to out-of-the-blue solicitations from sources that I’ve never had anything to do with, which may be legal or may be phishing attempts or other forms of fraud. I do get various kinds of advertising from legitimate businesses that I deal with, but there’s not a lot of that; it’s perfectly legit and sometimes even useful and I don’t mind it.
My spam folder apparently cleans out everything more than 7 days old automatically. I estimate mine now contains around 550 emails, so the pace has been picking up even over this past week.
Spam has been a solved problem (at least from the recipient POV) for about 15 years. My primary account is a 27yo Hotmail one, the few that get though are caught by Thunderbird.
Can’t you erase or delete them? This can often be done without reading them. Depending on the particular email format – try swiping sideways to see if a delete option appears, or right clicking which may bring up a menu.
If I right-click, that also marks them as Read. But I will try a few other things. Maybe I can just look at them to make sure there’s nothing I want, and then empty the folder.
edited to add: Yes, I can right click on the Spam folder and move them en bloc to Trash, at least that what it says it does, but they don’t appear in the Trash folder. Anyway, they’re gone. There’s also an option for Empty Spam, which I would interpret as delete all the emails in the Spam folder, but nothing happens. I’ll keep playing around with it as soon as I get more spam (3…2…1…)
Thanks for the suggestion, this looks like it will really help take the frustration out of this.
I’ve been looking at Tuta mail as an alternative to Comcast. One thing they have that I like is that every email moved to the spam folder is sent back to their server, to try to improve their spam filter. And for every spam they catch, I get a notification so I can use tools to go searching them if it looks like a regular email has gone astray. But I may not need to go that route, changing email providers, after all.
