I use Gmail (Google’s email) and it works OK. I do not read mail on Gmail website, instead I read it on my computers with the Thunderbird email client with IMAP:
So you get the new email provider. Switch all the websites (banking, shopping, forums) and regular correspondents to the new email provider. Then set up forwarding your email from Comcast to the new email provider, as you will have missed some. So gradually over time you will switch these stragglers to your new email address and after a few months when the only thing which is getting forwarded is spam you can quit the forwarding.
Huh. In my Yahoo box (I didn’t originally sign up for Yahoo, Frontier handed me over to them) it brings up a menu on which there are a number of options; “mark as read” is one of them but “delete” is another. Same for Mac Mail. But I know these things vary.
There are two choices when I right-click the Spam folder, Empty Spam, which appears to do nothing at all, and Move All Messages. So I can move all messages to the Trash without marking them as read, and I can see the number of unread messages accumulating in the Trash folder (only 41 so far today) and at the end of the day I can empty the Trash folder (I assume, I haven’t tried that yet) and it will be cleared for the next day’s junk. This process, although it is extra steps, may save me from moving to a different email provider. But I might do it anyway, I think it’s about time I divorce my email from the tentacles of Comcast.
When you do get false positives, make sure you use the interface to mark the message as not spam. This should tell the system that the sender is is desired, and hopefully will lower the odds of future messages from them ending up in your spam folder. I know this is available through the Comcast web interface.
If the spam messages are “real” spam, then there is probably not much you can do, but if some or many of them are ads from (semi-)legitimate businesses, then unsubscribing or blocking the sender will often help. For example, I was getting 1-2 ads a day from Temu, I clicked unsubscribe, and they stopped.
I don’t remember the exact details of which place uses which system, but some of the encrypted email sites like Proton and Tuta don’t allow email access through normal email clients like Thunderbird, Outlook, or Apple mail. You have to use their website or app. They have good reasons for this, but if you don’t care about that level of security, then it’s probably best to use a different provider.
Thanks for the suggestions.
A) yes, I always do that
B) they never are even semi-legit, always fake-o addresses (which Tuta seems to make it easier to see), probably the same few spammers because the style is the same for 90% of them
C) yes, I found that out when I wanted to add my new Tuta address (currently on soft open status) to my Mail app on my phone. I had to use their app, but I don’t mind that. Their PC interface is mostly functional, although they have unlabeled icons that don’t even have popup labels, which is annoying. I have to chase down whether there’s a setting for that (probably isn’t).
When you’re looking at email providers, one nice, optional feature is the ability to make up alias addresses that route to your main address. For instance, if your email address is “soandso@isp.com”, it’s nice if you can make up linked address like “soandso_sketchywebsite@isp.com”. You can use the alias addresses for special use cases and delete them if they get too spammy. Gmail has the ability to make alias addresses using the ‘+’ sign, but not all websites will accept addresses in that format since ‘+’ is not a character permitted by the email address standard.
Just a side note, about Comcast email specifically: I had commented on a Comcast forum, asking Comcast for some help, in a spam-complaints thread that had been sporadically active. Since I followed that thread, it seems to be blowing up, with lots of people echoing my complaints about sudden onset of huge numbers of spam emails. So it may be that Comcast has a new-ish problem, and maybe they are working on something (but they haven’t said so, and probably won’t until they have something to roll out). I’m not holding my breath in the meantime.
Oh, I also found that, in addition to right-clicking on the Spam folder, there is a hamburger menu, which has the same options, and on that menu the Empty Spam option works. So one less step to getting rid of it.
The + characters is permitted, but for some reason I can’t figure out lots of sites don’t think it is. A long time ago I used to use it like me+company@example.com, but it would often fail in aggravating ways. I think Lenovo (or maybe IBM?) was the worst. They would accept + when subscribing to a mailing list, but not when unsubscribing.
Not being able to rely on + caused me to eventually move to a structure like company@me.example.com. That has tons of advantages, and one huge disadvantage. I have to use an email host that lets me have unlimited aliases, or run my own email server. The first option is expensive, and the second is a huge pain.
Besides my Gmail I get email through my AT&T Uverse account. I use Thunderbird to read the latter. For a long time I almost never got junk mail showing up in my Thunderbird inbox, but last year I suddenly started getting bunches of them. Fortunately Thunderbird tagged almost all of it as junk mail, so it was easy to identify and delete it. Any junk mail that Thunderbird doesn’t tag, I make a point of tagging it as junk in hopes that this will improve whatever algorithm Thunderbird uses.
The weird thing is that when the junk mail first started showing up there would some that was “pre-dated” - on, say, March 15 there would be junk mail dated March 5, sometimes as early as February 25. This stopped after a while, and now all my junk mail is current.
Tuta mail does something like that, but a little more extreme: they put a notice in my Spam folder, and have the original message as an attachment, which I can download and read, if I want, using an email reader like Thunderbird. This is what they say in each one of these notifications: “we have received a mail that does not respect internet standards and is currently not supported by Tutanota.”
The trouble with this approach is that it makes it very difficult to find a legitimate email that has somehow ended up regarded as spam by the system; if I didn’t know about it, I wouldn’t even go looking. So I’m not sure how I feel about that yet.
I am currently basically running two parallel email systems for a test period. I am still monitoring the spam folder on Comcast and deleting those a few times a day without opening them, but all the non-spam incoming messages are being forwarded to Tuta Mail. If any of those forwarded mails are actually spam and recognized as such by Tuta, they are treated as described above. I have had three of those today, which is very unusually high for me.
I have ended my experiment with Tuta mail. They do too may things I don’t like, little things, but taken together make it less desirable for me than sticking with Comcast (for now). For example, on Amazon shipping emails, they eliminate the Tracking button and the pictures of items sent, for some reason. Also, and potentially much more serious, they seem to be treating some regular emails like spam. I got 5 apparently new spam emails yesterday, and I never get that many, and now I have to jump through some hoops to try to find out what they were.
Too bad, and I like their calendar, so I may keep using it.
These are removed because they are external to the email itself. These external links are created in such a way that Amazon can track when and from where you opened the email. Privacy focused email systems will default to not load external content to avoid sending this tracking information. There is probably a button to load external content.
A couple of possibilities as to why the images are shown are that they may be image links from trusted domains or the images were attachments. Attached images can be safely shown. Regardless, disabling automatic image loading is something you should use in your fight against spam. As you might imagine, spammers have email lists with hundreds of millions of addresses on it, but they don’t necessarily know which ones are still good or not. One way that spammers know that an address is for an actual person is that the image link in the email gets resolved. The image won’t necessarily be visible. It may be an image link to a 1x1 pixel that is custom for your email address (e.g. img src=“hteeteep://spammer.com/roderick_Femm_comast.com.jpg”). If that image gets loaded, they know that you opened the email. That gets you more spam since they they know you are opening the emails.
Typically, mail services will allow you to load images in specific emails or from certain senders. For instance, Gmail shows this:
It’s certainly not as convenient as always showing images by default, but it’s probably worth the hassle to help limit the amount of spam which makes it to your inbox.
Yes, I got that for other emails, where I could say “always trust this sender” and everything would show up. For some reason, for these Amazon emails, that option was not presented.
Interestingly, and quite possibly unrelated, but on Comcast, after two days of not marking spams as Read, so far today I have only had two repeat spams in the Spam folder instead of 100, but four new ones came to my In box. So I have some hope for relief, without switching email providers.
