Spam e mails

missile

I deleted 40 and blocked the senders this morning. Is there a more efficient way to stop them?

I don't really want to change my e mail account, but »»»»»>

flaneurs_lobster

Who is your email supplier?

Some are better than others at stopping this stuff before it gets to you.

Neil_Jones

Short of changing your email not really a lot else you can do.

If you're with a popular provider like Outlook, Yahoo or Gmail, its probably granted you can shove anything you like in front of the at symbol and it will match to somebody's account.

Depending on the provider you may be able to have a "trusted" list of contacts that always go to inbox and everything else goes to spam.

k_man

Are you also marking these messages as spam? Doing so feeds back into your email client/provider to identify and block future messages.

With most mainstream email providers once multiple users mark messages as spam, these are much more likely to be blocked at the server before reaching you.

Deleting does nothing to avoid future messages.

Also, while blocking sender's feels proactive, spam messages use false/spoofed sender addresses, so blocking is unlikely to help

JSmithy45AD

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/6683622/spam-e-mails

Depends on your definition of what a spam email is, if it's marketing emails from say the Aldi, use the unsubscribe link. Genuine dangerous spam is always caught by my Gmail account.

oldernonethewiser

Spam filters are good, but not infallible.

If genuine Spam then make sure you mark it as such as that helps everybody.

Deleting them without marking won't do anything useful.

I have a very old Gmail address and during COVID I was getting well over a thousand Spam emails everyday.

I now get about 10 a week and it is easy enough to check to see if a genuine one has been incorrectly identified as Spam

I rarely use the Gmail account any more but do check it every week, just in case there is anything useful/important there.

missile

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82139531#Comment_82139531

deleted@hotmail.com via outlook

PennysIntoPounds

It's not a fix for your email account but forwarding them to report@phishing.gov.uk before blocking helps play a small part in dealing with this problem.

It is awful but there's not much anyone can do about it. Either just consider it part of your daily checking emails admin, or set up another email address and gradually transition trusted senders over to it. Neither ideal I know!

If you're getting spam where it shows that it's been sent to multiple addresses you could see if you can spot the common denominator over time and block that person's email

missile

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82140116#Comment_82140116

I suspect like The Telephone Preference list and a.n.other government schemes reporting achieves little or nothing.

PennysIntoPounds

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/comment/82140258#Comment_82140258

Know the feeling but if a little can be achieved then that's better than nothing, and if we can re-imagine ourselves as people helping fight the good fight that's better than feeling like people just traipsing through a ton of endless spam.

You can't do anything to stop it, it's an opportunity for email hosts to charge you for a premium upgrade that won't work, they don't care about the intrusion and misery.

Your options are report and block or set up a new email and regularly check the old one to make sure you haven't missed anything important. Depressing but true, I've looked into it many a time. If anyone has better ideas I'm very keen to know about them!

Vitor

One option would be to open a Gmail account and set Outlook.com to forward incoming messages to it. Gmail’s spam filtering has been very effective in my experience, and forwarded messages still get checked, although there’s no guarantee it will catch everything.

That would let you try it without immediately abandoning your existing address. If it works well, you could gradually update banks, shopping accounts and contacts to use the new Gmail address, while keeping Outlook running for anything you’ve missed.