So much spam all of a sudden

maggiesoup

Like most people, I get spam from time to time but recently my modem packed in and it took Virgin a week to get a new one posted to me. In the meantime I got online on my laptop using a hotspot on my mobile. Although I've got my wi-fi back again I'm getting dozens of email spam. I was told my a friend that the hotspot can sometimes show your IP address (whatever that is, I'm 65 so don't have a clue) but how do I stop the endless spam emails now. I've done a couple of scans with free Malware and Avast but to no available.

Neil_Jones

Email doesn't work that way. It just comes to an address, your IP address has nothing to do with it.

Easiest solution is just to set up the spam filters on your account, possible set it to exclusive and then add addresses that you want email from, and put everything else into Junk.

Or change email address...

Chrysalis

A sudden surge of spam in my experience usually is as a result of a place you gave your email address to getting compromised, sadly its fairly widespread.

Some companies admit to it, others sweep it under the rug, e.g. oneplus recently got compromised, they emailed me. All of my details used to order my oneplus6 compromised except the card number.

maggiesoup

Chrysalis wrote: »

A sudden surge of spam in my experience usually is as a result of a place you gave your email address to getting compromised, sadly its fairly widespread.

Some companies admit to it, others sweep it under the rug, e.g. oneplus recently got compromised, they emailed me. All of my details used to order my oneplus6 compromised except the card number.

Yes, this makes sense. Ordered a jacket from USA a couple of weeks ago, this could be it. Just need to keep putting them into spam.

[Deleted User]

maggiesoup wrote: »

Yes, this makes sense. Ordered a jacket from USA a couple of weeks ago, this could be it. Just need to keep putting them into spam.

It's not necessarily been comprised either as the USA company could have cheerfully sold the details on.

Sapphire

Colin_Maybe wrote: »

It's not necessarily been comprised either as the USA company could have cheerfully sold the details on.

Like many other companies, throughout the world, not just the USA.

I've also noticed an increase in spam emails – they usually go into my junk mail folder and I just delete them without opening them, let alone clicking onto any links contained in them.

Neil_Jones

At any point in time I can see anywhere between 25 and 175 "junk" emails received over the previous 30 days, can't remember the last time it dropped to a single digit number.

Unfortunately it only needs one person to click on the link(s) to make the entire exercise worthwhile and if they fill in a form somewhere having claimed to be from PayPal the spammer will be laughing all the way to the bank.

caveman38

I have gmail accounts that I use exclusively for business. I also have ntlworld.com email addresses for myself and 3 other members of my family. FYI ntl were the forerunners of VM.
My gmail addresses get no spam emails but the VM (ntlworld) ones get 20 a day on each account.
I have set rules for each account to mark as spam and not forward certain headers, but they are breached by subtle changes that render the rules useless ie. Bitcoin then bit.coin or "Bitcoin".
In time I will cancel all VM email addresses, it is only laziness that stops me informing all my contacys of an alternative gmail addrerss

unrecordings

I judiciously use the 'blocked phrases' function from my provider such that I can have a good run of zero messages in my spam folder - but yes I've seen a noticeable increase in the last few days The spam itself isn't black friday related, but I'm guessing the volume of spam is. Unless a new player has bought a new list (I admit to having no idea how these things work)

Neil_Jones

unrecordings wrote: »

I judiciously use the 'blocked phrases' function from my provider such that I can have a good run of zero messages in my spam folder - but yes I've seen a noticeable increase in the last few days The spam itself isn't black friday related, but I'm guessing the volume of spam is. Unless a new player has bought a new list (I admit to having no idea how these things work)

For the big email providers like Yahoo, Gmail and Outlook.com it's almost certainly guaranteed you can bash any random combination of characters in before the @ and it will go to a valid inbox, as these have massive user bases.

Everything else is usually scraped from pages where an email address has been published relatively clear or has an easily defeated deterrent (like fred at nospam.provider.x for example) on it. I dare say when services are comprised in security breaches a lot more happens to the email addresses collected, because as well as in the majority of cases their being used to log into the services, they're good to feed to spam bots too.