Tons of spam all of a sudden
9One of my emails is outlook. I haven’t been on the internet much the last week or so, certainly haven’t clicked on anything suspicious (even missed a day with the click face here) and suddenly I am getting 100+ spam emails a day, mostly landing in my inbox rather than my spam folder.
Anyone have any idea why? This email I have had for years and seldom got spam until this recent flood. Any ideas how to make it stop?
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By the way, as a person who’s had hotmail since before Microsoft owned it, I think it might be time to let it go. I have hung onto it as a “junk” inbox for the past few years but it pales in functionality compared to gmail and privacy compared to… I dunno, something people pay for I guess.
Tip: if you sign up for something with your gmail, use a + sign to create a unique address. That way you can see who gave up your email address and go from there. Example: thisisme1298@gmail.com becomes thisisme1298+meh@gmail.com They both go to the same inbox, but you can create filters and labels based on the latter, and/or complain to meh that you’re now getting spam because you gave them that address
@Superllama7
Not sure whether outlook.com address policies got applied to hotmail.com addresses, but regarding privacy, outlook.com, unlike gmail, claims they do not scan your email content to display ads.
@Superllama7 you can use . In your Gmail for unique address too. Either way I just use my Hotmail for garbage and my Gmail for actual adult shit. Separate inboxes
@Superllama7 @unksol @RedOak
If you’re looking for private email, look into protonmail.com. It’s not free, because running mail servers and storage and internet bandwidth ain’t free.
Also, if you want to something to scan your email and compare it with lots of other people’s email and check it for sketchy links (again all of this security stuff is crowd-sourced these days), that inherently involves letting that something inspect your email (to filter spam senders) and to convert insecure links and run dynamic web mail and javascript in a sandbox, you kinda have to bend a bit on privacy. Just choose your partners/sharing carefully.
Protonmail.com is my top choice for a solid privacy-focused webmail and IMAP/POP3 email providers.
Here’s an article for finding the right service for you.
https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/what-to-look-for-in-a-private-and-secure-email-service-provider/
@mike808 @RedOak @Superllama7 @unksol Looks like Protonmail has a free version too. Not sure what functionalities the free has though. They do tell the upgrades for the other versions, but not upgraded from what.
@Kidsandliz @RedOak @Superllama7 @unksol
The limitations of the free account are:
NOT in free account:
Email Filters, Autoresponder, Catch-All Email, Multi-User Support
Extra Storage: $ 1/mo or $9/yr per GB
Extra Domains: $ 2/mo or $18/yr per domain
Extra Addresses: $1/mo or $9/yr per 5 addresses
@mike808 Thanks for posting that.
I actually wrote to microsoft about it and got this reply:
"Hi There,
Thank you for contacting Outlook.com Support. My name is Soubhik and I will be helping you with the concern.
I would like to inform you that this a known issue in Outlook.com where the Junk emails are landing in your Inbox folder by a glitch in the system. But be assured that we and our Engineering team are currently working on this matter and a fix will soon be rolled out in the form of an update however, we don’t have an ETA for now.
Please accept our sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused."
They offered some suggestions that obviously didn’t work, including blocking senders (I’ve done this 50 times in the last 2 days for several repeat offenders) and how to create rules (I tried that, not much help)
Anyway, hopefully it will be fixed soon. I don’t use hotmail for much but ads and coupons anymore, but the notifications are driving me up the wall
@Superllama7 THANK YOU!!! I had also tried blocking senders. At we know it is nothing we screwed up with. I mean, I suddenly still am getting far more than normal - inbox or junk mail folder - but at least there is hope that more will land in the junk mail sometime down the line.
@Superllama7 Notifications are basically terrorism and should be disabled at first opportunity in nearly every case.
In Mail.app on iOS, for example, it’s under Settings -> Mail -> Notifications, and then you’ve got per-account settings.
@InnocuousFarmer Good tip! Maybe a little too nuclear for me, though. Personally, I prefer email providers give me the ability to screen my inbox per my interests (ex: not spam) and get notified if something makes it to my inbox
@Superllama7 You gotta try it – a day or two without attentional theft from interruptions. At least turn off the interruption features, so you have to go look at the notifications list voluntarily. It is like unto having a mind of your own.
This happened to me too this week! And here I thought all of the sexy singles in my area that were looking for action had disappeared!
@melonscoop The best one I keep seeing is “Problems with morning wood?”. I can imagine people having problems with no wood, or problems with too much wood, but this seems a little too specific
@Superllama7 that might be just clean enough to clear the spam filters, and just dirty enough to catch peoples attention.
@melonscoop @Superllama7 I keep getting work from home spam and what I think must be viagra ads… in Swedish or something.
@InnocuousFarmer @melonscoop @Superllama7
Arbeta hemifrån och tjäna stora pengar på att sälja Viagra!
@melonscoop @Superllama7 @therealjrn Looks right… probably, that.
@melonscoop my boyfriend was building a computer for me this weekend so when Windows was installed I kept getting the outlook email pop ups telling me I had a new email for “sexy singles” and “barbarian xl” and “solar panels.”
/giphy shut it down
@melonscoop @Superllama7 he’s probably chopping wood
@riskybryzness sexy solar panels are desperate for action!
Mine just hit yesterday with my outlook account. I’ve been having the same exact problem. Suppose I’m glad to see it’s not just me.
@riskybryzness Well I guess I am glad it just isn’t me too… but it sure sucks.
@Kidsandliz @riskybryzness Looks like an Outlook issue… My Outlook address also started letting through craploads of spam right into the inbox yesterday. Wonder what’s up.
@Kidsandliz @stinks woke up this morning and mine appears to be fixed.
@riskybryzness @stinks That is the conclusion I reached too.
wow… that sux! Unfortunately once it starts it is very hard to stop. I use POPfile to keep my outlook mail cleaned up and once it gets trained it works pretty well. I would guess that some douchebag company sold your email address (or got hacked), or you accidentally clicked thru on something that started the deluge. That is one reason I have several email addresses. Our family email only goes to people we want to correspond with, and except when one of our contacts has gotten their email compromised it has done well. The one my meh traffic goes to is basically also very clean since I haven’t used it for much else. A couple are basically throwaways for when we have to supply an email to access some site (I check them once a month or so to keep them active). At one time my Juno.com email account had over 10K mails in it. I eventually cleaned them all out and am now starting over…
So you decided to spam up a “Daily Deals” site forum with your own spam that is compltelely off topic. Well played…(or not)
@elfunkman Lots of “off topic” threads on this site. That is one of the things I appreciate about it. Several mentioned it was nice to know they weren’t the only ones with this problem too.
@elfunkman I was going to start a thread to complain about a single sentence in an article I read recently about the medium Eva C., a topic I believe to be of no interest to anyone here, or anywhere else. I haven’t yet, obviously, but I’m still SUPER IRRITATED about it so I probably will.
The SMS spam is thick this year… but my email is same as it ever was so far…
@thismyusername you get text spam? I never do. I get my fair share of calls from S©am Likely, but have only ever gotten 2-3 spam texts…
@mehvid1 since the start of the new year everyone I know (and some strangers comments as well) on every carrier have been getting barrages of “2020 RESOLUTION AMAZON” click grabbers and “YOUR FEDEX ORDER” click grabbers… (that is they roll you through several websites to ‘steal’ your ‘views’ to drive up their total impressions for ad fraud… and they finally land on a scam to try to get you to give up your credit card for “shipping” your “free item” for taking the “amazon survey”)
at one point the at&t spam reporting system broke from everyone forwarding them to them.
@mehvid1 @thismyusername
Agreed, been getting those fake Amazon texts as well as the typical “would you like to talk” spam more frequently all of a sudden.
Perhaps the carriers lighting up their SPAM call filters has pushed some of them over to texts?
My hotmail account has been pretty sketchy the past few days as well… glad we’re not all alone in this battle.
Actually this morning it seems to have cut back significantly. Of course the spammers may have the day off too
Yah, this sucks, clearly something about the outlook.com spam filters is broken.
Normally, my spam (“junk” in MS terms) gets loaded up regularly even tho my address is not made of common words and I rarely give this backup email address out.
But it would be interesting to know why virtually 100% of the SPAM that address gets, is UK-focused. I’ve never shared it with any UK related entity.
/giphy spam spam spam
It’s everywhere