• Dozens of phishing e-mails

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    #486644

    I have an email account from my RoadRunner provider, and a Hotmail account. Emails to my RoadRunner account get automatically forwarded to my Hotmail account.

    It’s ironic, but months ago, when Stratfor was hacked, both my email addresses were part of the thousands of accounts that were captured.

    Every day I get dozens of phishing emails sent to me. They all wind up in my junk mail folder in Hotmail, are easy to spot, and I just delete them.

    It seems like it would be a pain to rectify, but I wonder how some of you would deal with this issue.

    Any advice would be gratefully received,
    Dick

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    • #1360768

      Dick,

      A pain is right. 😆 I recently went through changing email addresses for a different reason, I wanted to be free of a given ISP so I changed both my and my wife’s email addresses (we both have multiple) to GMail. I now have one for Friends/Family only, one for Social Networking sites only, and one for Financial Institutions only. The only way I could see to do it was to list all the sites I used in a spreadsheet with the current email address registered and one by one go to them and change to the appropriate new address and mark in the spreadsheet which one it now uses. I’m about 6 months in and still every now and then I come across one I have missed. Luckily I haven’t changed ISPs yet so the old ones are still active. It is a painstakingly arduious process but one well worth taking IMHO.

      Often the hardest part is to get your friends/family to start using the new address. I’ve noticed a large dropoff of forwarded emails since, even if they have started using the new address for directly sent emails they haven’t changed any distribution lists, they are still going to the old addresses.

      Good Luck with whatever you decide to do. :cheers:

      May the Forces of good computing be with you!

      RG

      PowerShell & VBA Rule!
      Computer Specs

    • #1360769

      I don’t think you can do much other than enduring it. I would get new email addresses and would start the slow process of replacing the existing ones everywhere possible.

    • #1360849

      I can sympathize Dick. I also get a lot of junk email in both RR and Hotmail. I do the same as you, Delete! I suppose you could set up some custom filters at the Hotmail servers, which might filter out some of it. Unfortunately I never had much success with the filters. Also unfortunately, whether your servers are hacked or not, those people just always seem to find a way to get our emails.

    • #1360924

      And you know what…….. i’ve found out that a whole lot of folks don’t know how to change your default email address so they keep on using it !!!

      Address book, properties……Dah!! sad but true.

    • #1360954

      Jagworld:
      I don’t understand your comment. Do you mean me; spammers; who??
      Dick

    • #1361006

      No- the general customer base doesn’t have a clue how to chg someones email address.

      • #1361424

        For those of you changing email addresses, you might consider buying your own domain and running email only on that. I own chattertonclan.com and I pay $60 per year ($4.95 per month) for Email and $30 every other year for the domain name. But with that I have infinite [name]@chattertonclan.com so my entire family can have email and I can set up email forwarding, etc. And I can be on any ISP/webmail and still use the same old email address.

        It was pretty easy to set up.

        Craig

        • #1361428

          For those of you changing email addresses, you might consider buying your own domain and running email only on that. I own chattertonclan.com and I pay $60 per year ($4.95 per month) for Email and $30 every other year for the domain name. But with that I have infinite [name]@chattertonclan.com so my entire family can have email and I can set up email forwarding, etc. And I can be on any ISP/webmail and still use the same old email address.

          It was pretty easy to set up.

          Craig

          That’s exactly what we have, except that we have only five actual email boxes. But we have seemingly infinite virtual email addresses. We use Rackspace. They have superb 24/7 tech support.

          Group "L" (Linux Mint)
          with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server
        • #1362518

          For those of you changing email addresses, you might consider buying your own domain and running email only on that. I own chattertonclan.com and I pay $60 per year ($4.95 per month) for Email and $30 every other year for the domain name. But with that I have infinite [name]@chattertonclan.com so my entire family can have email and I can set up email forwarding, etc. And I can be on any ISP/webmail and still use the same old email address.

          It was pretty easy to set up.

          Craig

          Out of curiosity, what happens if the company you’ve gotten the domain from goes out of business?

          • #1364174

            Out of curiosity, what happens if the company you’ve gotten the domain from goes out of business?

            That’s easy, you just move your domain to another provider.

            The problem I have with my own domain is spoofed bounces. Spammers use mydomain.com as the “sent from” address & I get all the auto-responders’ “message undeliverable” replies. If anyone has a solution for that, I’d be exceedingly grateful.:rolleyes:

    • #1361547

      Even without incidents like yours, I’ve noticed that my paid Yahoo Mail Plus Account has been letting more spam through lately, although it does go to my Spam Folder, so it is being correctly filtered. I wonder if the spammers have figured out a new way to get around ISP spam filtering? Or maybe the ISPs have been relaxing their policies regarding simply bouncing spam and not letting us see it at all. I just scan for any stray actual mail and hit the trashcan icon. With virtually unlimited email storage, there’s never an issue of filling up my allocation, and my email client (Pegasus Mail) doesn’t download from the Spam Folder when in POP-3 Mode. IMAP (Fastmail free or OperaMail) does download all the Spam.

      -- rc primak

      • #1362533

        It is common knowledge that Yahoo will let SPAM go through their system for a price. That is why you will see SPAM surges. Even when filter properly, it appears that the Pay-to-SPAM messages are sent to the inbox. It’s quite a pain sometimes.

        On the other hand, Gmail does a good and consistent job filtering SPAM to the SPAM/Junk folder. (I have both Yahoo Plus and Gmail accounts.)

    • #1361583

      My Verizon account, which I’ve had for over five years, gets virtually no spam. My newer gmail account gets a lot of spam, but it’s very easy to delete all the spam at once from the spam folder.

    • #1361595

      GMail Spam does sometimes download into email clients. I don’t know why or how to prevent it.

      -- rc primak

      • #1361636

        If you want your own domain and unlimited email accounts. I use hostignition.com for $20 year for hosting. I have no connection other than customer and I’m not providing you with a link for credit. Just a happy customer who likes to point out deals! 😉

        $20 plus baremetal or someone for domain for about $10.

    • #1361686

      If you get free email (yahoo, gmail, etc), you aren’t paying them, but they have to make their money somehow, so they sell info. That’s why spam filtering isn’t going to be as effective with the free accounts.

      Group "L" (Linux Mint)
      with Windows 10 running in a remote session on my file server
      • #1362448

        If you get free email (yahoo, gmail, etc), you aren’t paying them, but they have to make their money somehow, so they sell info. That’s why spam filtering isn’t going to be as effective with the free accounts.

        This is a Yahoo paid Mail Plus Account. The spam increase accompanied an interface update.

        -- rc primak

        • #1362507

          This is a Yahoo paid Mail Plus Account.

          You also discussed Gmail spam.

          The spam increase accompanied an interface update.

          You didn’t mention that in your previous conjecture about the cause.

          Bruce

          • #1363198

            You also discussed Gmail spam.

            You didn’t mention that in your previous conjecture about the cause.

            Bruce

            Yes, GMail has had a similar increase in spam, and without a major reformatting of the user interface. So this is also worthy of mention.

            Additional information about the Yahoo interface change was added just to narrow down possible factors affecting the spam increase. It could have been only a coincidence. Or, the spam filtering policies may have changed at the same time as the interface changes. Hard to say.

            @hiketheball —

            Can you cite articles proving a pay-for-spam policy at Yahoo? This is news to me.

            -- rc primak

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