Sudden Flood of Spam emails

[travelover]

I have three email accounts and all are accessed via Thunderbird. I would almost never get spam anymore, as the providers seem to have effective filters.


Suddenly my old hotmail account has been bursting with spam emails. Any idea what might have changed to cause the inrush of spam?

 

[aja8888]

I have three email accounts and all are accessed via Thunderbird. I would almost never get spam anymore, as the providers seem to have effective filters.


Suddenly my old hotmail account has been bursting with spam emails. Any idea what might have changed to cause the inrush of spam?

Queen funeral spam?

 

[CardsFan]

I have had just the opposite. One or 2 spams a day (going to the spam folder), and most of them are actually promotion emails, not a Nigerian prince, et. al.

But, I find they go in spurts. A while back I was getting 5-10/day.

 

[scrabbler1]

Back in mid-2016, I learned that my email address had somehow appeared on the Dark Web. Before that, I rarely got any junk/spam emails. After that, I began getting a lot of them. I changed a setting in my web-based email system to allow emails only from senders whose email addresses were in my Contacts list. However, I use that email system's PC-based email, so the web-based Contacts list was incomplete. It took some time to populate that contacts list, as I had a lot of emails erroneously sent to the junk/spam folder (it was tedious but not difficult to fix this). Nowadays, it is rare that an email goes to junk/spam by mistake, and I am more mindful about checking the junk/spam folder for mistakes.

I get about 10 junk/spam emails a day sent to the junk/spam folder. I can block entire domain names but can't do that if they use a gmail domain name.

 

[Qs Laptop]

Same thing happened about a month ago with my old AOL account. This happened right after MS Outlook re-synched the account.

Judging by the amount of spam I get something terrible must have happened at Camp LeJuene. Also, I can't believe how many free things I've won.

So now it's right click Junk, Block Sender 20-25 times a day.

Also, how many times do I have to tell Dementia Times I want to unsubscribe? It's like they're not hearing or remembering me!

 

[travelover]

...........
Also, how many times do I have to tell Dementia Times I want to unsubscribe? It's like they're not hearing or remembering me!

Maybe you are just forgetting to unsubscribe.

 

[disneysteve]

Judging by the amount of spam I get something terrible must have happened at Camp LeJuene.

Same here. The barrage of emails about that the past few weeks has been ridiculous.

 

[Irishgirlyc58]

Same here. The barrage of emails about that the past few weeks has been ridiculous.

Same! I just delete them and move on.
Someone on this site started a thread with the name in the title and every time I came across it I automatically swiped to delete it. [emoji23]

 

[jim584672]

No spam here. I didn't even know hotmail was still a thing.

 

[Tadpole]

I am having the same problem with a really old hotmail account too. I went and looked. The Camp LeJuene thing arrived today but only one with that subject. I have younger hotmail account that, so far, is not being spammed. In my case the spam has been coming for a couple of days and, yes, suddenly. A couple of the spams mention businesses with which I actually do business, but I don't use the hotmail account with these businesses. Creepy coincidence though.

 

[Dreamer]

I have been getting several the last week or so on my hotmail account also.

 

[COcheesehead]

It goes in spurts. More after travel, never understood why. They eventually settle down.

 

[COcheesehead]

No spam here. I didn't even know hotmail was still a thing.

They made everyone convert to an msn address years ago, but maybe some didn’t get the email.

 

[easysurfer]

I have three email accounts and all are accessed via Thunderbird. I would almost never get spam anymore, as the providers seem to have effective filters.


Suddenly my old hotmail account has been bursting with spam emails. Any idea what might have changed to cause the inrush of spam?

Have you done any reinstalling of Thunderbird or your computer lately?

I don't have Thunderbird but another email reader that has an efficient filter.

At times I've had to restore my PC and seems like the learning the spam filter did forgets so I'd have to re-train. Re-training by marking bunch of spam as junk. After the email reader learns (in about a week of my marking), the email reader goes back to about 95% accurate at spotting spam.

 

[ShokWaveRider]

I use MailWasher Pro to filter my email on my Laptop PC. It keeps SPAM at bay. I rarely get emails on any other platform unless I am traveling, I am not there yet. I am still a PC person. I much prefer a full keyboard. Phones for me are toy when it comes to doing anything constructive, but great as a phone. MMDV

 

[Aerides]

maybe the problem is hotmail? It's a very old email provider, probably doesn't have the best spam filters.

And if I wanted to target "older" folks, I'd go for it - hotmail, aol, yahoo, etc.

 

[MBAustin]

My older e-mail account is powered by Yahoo and has been flooded with spam for the past several weeks. My newer one is on iCloud and has not been affected (yet). I've been trying to migrate to the newer one but after 20 years it's a long process, and I''ll need to keep it for quite a while as every once in a while I get an e-mail from someone I haven't heard from in many years.

 

[Ncc1701]

This happened to me where I was getting one spam email every 10 seconds for two days. This was done deliberately by a hacker so that I would not notice the Amazon order confirmation emails I was getting. He hacked my Amazon account, used my $600 gift card balance and went shopping. This was before the days of MFA.

I'll give credit to Amazon though. After 2 weeks, they gave me back the $600.

 

[FlaMariner]

So I've had a ATT/BellSouth/yahoo email account forever.

Recently the spam emails have increased dramatically for me....I mean like 10-15 a day. I'm thinking the ATT/BellSouth/yahoo email account (it changed owners many times) are using my old email address (had it since email began) as an experiment of some kind to see how low they can go at pestering me......It is starting to work as I have finally taken a serious transition to outlook email.

Very frustrating but trying to move on.

 

[travelover]

Have you done any reinstalling of Thunderbird or your computer lately?..........

I've not changed anything, but isn't the filtering done by Microsoft on their end?

 

[travelover]

maybe the problem is hotmail? It's a very old email provider, probably doesn't have the best spam filters.

And if I wanted to target "older" folks, I'd go for it - hotmail, aol, yahoo, etc.

Actually there is no more Hotmail, it has evolved to be Microsoft Outlook which I have to assume is completely supported.


You may be right about targeting hotmail addressees assuming we are old codgers.

 

[easysurfer]

I've not changed anything, but isn't the filtering done by Microsoft on their end?

By saying you use Thunderbird, is that you aren't getting your email through a webpage but an email reader?

I don't use Thunderbird but Sylpheed as my email reader which is similar.

In my case, the what is junk mail training is done with the email reader. I mark what I consider as spam/junk. Then after about 1000 or so, the reader knows pretty much how to treat future email as junk or not.

1000 seems like a lot but the marking can be done with old email instead of new ones just coming in.

 

[prudent_one]

This happened to me where I was getting one spam email every 10 seconds for two days. This was done deliberately by a hacker so that I would not notice the Amazon order confirmation emails I was getting. He hacked my Amazon account, used my $600 gift card balance and went shopping. This was before the days of MFA.

I'll give credit to Amazon though. After 2 weeks, they gave me back the $600.

This is what I was coming to write. But you can usually tell if you're getting flooded with spam from all kinds of places vs. just a lot of the typical spam. Hackers are hoping you miss legit emails from sites where they changed your account info, etc.

It's a war with spammers continuously looking for ways to elude spam filters and software being updated to catch those new ways.

 

[travelover]

By saying you use Thunderbird, is that you aren't getting your email through a webpage but an email reader?

I don't use Thunderbird but Sylpheed as my email reader which is similar.

In my case, the what is junk mail training is done with the email reader. I mark what I consider as spam/junk. Then after about 1000 or so, the reader knows pretty much how to treat future email as junk or not.

1000 seems like a lot but the marking can be done with old email instead of new ones just coming in.

Yes, Thunderbird is a Firefox email reader. It pulls emails off my three accounts and displays them in a single list. I think I can ask it to block certain addresses, but the majority of the spam filtering is done by the email hosts themselves using algorithms to spot spam.

 

[easysurfer]

Yes, Thunderbird is a Firefox email reader. It pulls emails off my three accounts and displays them in a single list. I think I can ask it to block certain addresses, but the majority of the spam filtering is done by the email hosts themselves using algorithms to spot spam.

You don't train Thunderbird by marking samples of your email as junk or not?

Quoted from the training section:

In order for Thunderbird's junk filter to be effective, you must train it to recognize messages that you consider to be junk and messages that you consider to be not junk. So it is important to mark messages as junk before deleting them.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/thunderbird-and-junk-spam-messages#w_training-the-junk-filter