*#*# spam mail

Katykat

Last chance saloon before I change my email address, which I don’t want to do because it’s just not fair. For a long time now, my junk mail is loaded every day with ( at times) bordering on !!!!!! emails. Now I now it’s junk, but even so, I can’t stop it. I’ve done the things advised - gone into settings, rules, & blocked almost every connotation of the address, message etc but still the same messages are getting through. I swear I don’t want another “ message from Julia” or “I have been chosen”. I’m a 68 yr old grandma, and I don’t want this any more. Is there ANYTHING I can do to stop it?

Neil_Jones

Spam is a fact of life with email unfortunately.

Either set up your junk mail filters to only send to inbox messages from people you want to receive from (moving everything else to junk in the process), or get a new email address but don't give it to anybody.  Which sort of defeats the point.

Oneye12

If your ‘!!!!!! Emails’ is around 5,000 a day then you can assume you have purposely being targeted.
And if it’s been going on for a while, then I would go for a new email address.

Don’t delete the old, as once the account is full the spam would bounce back with error messages from where they came. After a couple of months I guess you could go back and see if it’s useful again.

It was many years ago I lost a business account - spam was coming in every 5-6 seconds. You are left wondering what they have achieved, but it’s not worth worrying about.

Oneye12

The future is to keep both accounts - one for use and the other for backup. I’ve found this useful on odd occasions.

grumpycrab

Talk to a computer friend.... 1. get a gmail address   2.  forward ALL your existing email to gmail (it has an excellent spam filter)   3. setup gmail so that you can send email from gmail and make it look as if you're sending gmail from your original address.

debitcardmayhem

You don't say how you read your emails, nor what you are using for filtering other than "settings rules etc". Who is your email provider ? AOL,Yahoo, Google, Microsoft etc etc. You need to give more information

Katykat

It’s hotmail. The spam is going to the junk folder, but I do check it because sometimes, genuine mail goes to junk instead of inbox. It’s not thousands a day, more like 40-50.  It’s looking like it might be a change of address. 

Neil_Jones

Katykat said:

It’s hotmail. The spam is going to the junk folder, but I do check it because sometimes, genuine mail goes to junk instead of inbox. It’s not thousands a day, more like 40-50.  It’s looking like it might be a change of address. 

Changing your email address does not necessarily reduce the amount of junk you get.  Once you start using it and there happens to be a leak of some sort to a service that you've used that email address to, you'll be back in the same position again in due course.

Of course if you set your Outlook up properly, make use of the "Safe Senders" toption and the rules, and actually mark as spam what shouldn't be in the inbox, the majority of what you want will go in your inbox and the rest won't:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/10-tips-on-how-to-help-reduce-spam-55f756e8-688b-41c3-a086-8f68ccc592f6

J_B

Katykat said:

  It’s looking like it might be a change of address. 

This is good advice ....

grumpycrab said:

Talk to a computer friend.... 1. get a gmail address   2.  forward ALL your existing email to gmail (it has an excellent spam filter)   3. setup gmail so that you can send email from gmail and make it look as if you're sending gmail from your original address.

forgotmyname

Use LOTS of email addresses and you can easily narrow down where the spam comes from. I have a couple of email accounts
that I use for general sites and forums.

I use a dedicated email for my ebay and a different one for paypal. Dedicated emails for my banking etc. and another for insurance
where the companies may change. If these start to get spam I can easily swap them the following year.

Neil_Jones

Of course it should be noted that you can usually put any random combination of characters in front of @ hotmail.com (or similar for Yahoo or Gmail) and it will almost always match to an active inbox, such is the popularity of those free email providers - Hotmail is believed to have a user base of 400 million (hotmail and outlook.com email addresses), Yahoo about 230 million and Gmail, well wipes the floor with the lot user base wise, at near enough four times the user base of Hotmail/Outlook.com.