block sender vs report phishing?

Brie

what's the difference?

On one device I can block senders and on the other I can report phishing.  But neither seems to be doing much good - likely to do with the automated generating of senders' email addresses I would guess.  I seem to have such a massive problem everytime I come home from holidays, as if using my outlook account at a foreign hotel has signed me up for all sorts.  Had about 40 items yesterday morning waiting in my junk folder plus others in my inbox.  Majority in English, a lot in Dutch with the occasional Spaniard or Swede.

forgotmyname

Create emails just for places you will never read anything they send.  I have an ancient AOL email that used to have a block everyone
except those I list so it kept all the spam away and only allowed the select few companies I actually wanted email from.

When Yahoo took over and removed that spam filter I updated the email address for those I wanted mail from and
that address is now pure spam, I never need to read it.  Delete in bulk every now and then.

I have a load of AOL/Yahoo emails for signing up to generic sites, gmail for the select few and a personal email I use
for the important stuff.

When your reporting is it going to the ISP, Email provider or the Email client company?

Brie

forgotmyname said:

Create emails just for places you will never read anything they send.  I have an ancient AOL email that used to have a block everyone
except those I list so it kept all the spam away and only allowed the select few companies I actually wanted email from.

When Yahoo took over and removed that spam filter I updated the email address for those I wanted mail from and
that address is now pure spam, I never need to read it.  Delete in bulk every now and then.

I have a load of AOL/Yahoo emails for signing up to generic sites, gmail for the select few and a personal email I use
for the important stuff.

When your reporting is it going to the ISP, Email provider or the Email client company?


I know you are trying to help but I must admit I don't know what you are really trying to say.  I don't sign up for things, I block as many cookies as I can when I look at a website.  I have a gmail account that I never use and that accumulates spam/junk occasionally and I go in and delete every couple of months.

It's my personal hotmail account that seems to get flooded with Ukrainian beauties, foreign lawyers needing ££ transfers done, free stuff being given to me for no reason and just require me to click a link to receive (which I never do of course).  Plus all the "manly" ones too.  I'm no prude in any sense but even the subject lines of those make me shudder.

forgotmyname

What I was trying to say is have email accounts for those registrations that you need never receive an email other
than the first confirmation one.

Out of curiosity I had a look at my main spam email and there are 9000 spam emails. Many are your parcel delivery,
your subscription is ending, we need to contact you and voucher/discount offers.

I also use a plugin that shows the true senders email rather than just the nickname field.

Brie

forgotmyname said:

What I was trying to say is have email accounts for those registrations that you need never receive an email other
than the first confirmation one.

Out of curiosity I had a look at my main spam email and there are 9000 spam emails. Many are your parcel delivery,
your subscription is ending, we need to contact you and voucher/discount offers.

I also use a plugin that shows the true senders email rather than just the nickname field.

Hmmm....well I only sign up to things where I want to get emails.  So I still can't see how having a second (3rd, 4th) account will help.  But it seems to me you're saying that no matter what there will be junk/spam and I have to simply live with it.

Plugin?  Used to be I could hold my curser over the email address and the real one would show but that doesn't always work now - might be due to me using a slightly broken mouse.

Slinky

Ditch hotmail and move to gmail. Has much better spam filters in my experience.

Brie

Slinky said:

Ditch hotmail and move to gmail. Has much better spam filters in my experience.

Thanks but no.  I can't stand how gmail works.  Am massively pleased that work has just ditched that for hotmail.

DullGreyGuy

Brie said:

what's the difference?

On one device I can block senders and on the other I can report phishing.  But neither seems to be doing much good - likely to do with the automated generating of senders' email addresses I would guess.  I seem to have such a massive problem everytime I come home from holidays, as if using my outlook account at a foreign hotel has signed me up for all sorts.  Had about 40 items yesterday morning waiting in my junk folder plus others in my inbox.  Majority in English, a lot in Dutch with the occasional Spaniard or Swede.

In a corporate setting, reporting phishing goes to network security and they can consider taking further action to either block the emails coming in and/or accessing whatever website or attachment they are using to do the actual phishing. 

Block sender just does that as if you are in Projects for example you will forever get small companies emailing you about their amazing new software or QA service etc that would really benefit your employer/client. Its just cold calling so you block them as its not of interest to you but no need to get InfoSec on the case as the mails arent malicious. 

Block sender works fine, with most you can block either the sender or the senders domain, but if you are talking about more malicious emails then they tend to be spoofing the sender address randomly so blocking is of limited use. 

I used to do what others suggest and make a special email address for each and every company I dealt with which helped me identify who had leaked my email and easy to fully block it by closing that email alias. It then became a faff when my webhost changed their email rules so stopped for a while but now Apple have a "hide my email" function built in that does exactly this so have started using it again (though my old system was easier as I could do "theircompany@mycompany.com" as my email so instantly see who it is whereas now I have to go into settings to see who "random.set.of.workds@mycompnay.com" is