Spam Email Inundation Windows Live Mail

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Hi Loungers,

I’ve been experiencing a huge increase in spam email since the beginning of August. Blocking each one individually (via Junk -> block sender/sender’s domain) doesn’t seem to work and is extremely time-consuming. System is Windows 7, SP1.

The spam occurs in Windows Live Mail accounts as well as in the accounts on our domain host.

Is there a solution for this? I have Windows firewall and Security Essentials installed and up to date. I’m not sure what to do or where to go to minimize the onslaught and would sure appreciate any (not too technical) suggestions.

Thanks for your advice,

Linda

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? says:

Hi Linda,

is the spam going into your main mail box or spam box? if it is in the main box, you could throttle the incoming senders down to known senders for a time and see if they go away. if it is being placed in the spam box then you may have a new unwanted admirer(s) from somewhere. i have an ancient hotmail, a live, a yahoo and an aol. the hotmail and live are set to known senders and stay spam free, the yahoo does great all by itself but the aol started demanding payment to keep spam bounced away last year so i run them through spam email readers to get the true ip addresses and speedguide ip locator to check if they are blacklisted. i don’t know if it helps to do this, however; the aol account was getting 10-20 per day when oath\verizon took over and now i get 1-2 per day along with adds telling me i can buy spam protection that used to be part of the basic service…

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Oops, sorry, Anonymous: had missed your response at first.

Thanks for the suggestions. May try your known senders tip: the spam comes into the main inbox and is in an account we muse primarily for personal email. Will monitor the non-spam email we get

there for a few days and see if it could be worth creating a known senders list.

Appreciate you replying!

Linda

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There is almost nothing you can do about spam apart from mark it as such in your email app and hope its junk filter works. Blocking individual senders is a waste of time because the email rarely comes from the address listed in the email – it’s spoofed. I’d empty the blocked senders list as you may prevent legitimate mail.

Your email provider should be doing the work for you by not letting the email through in the first place, so it may be something you need to take up with them.

cheers, Paul

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Thanks, Paul. Was afraid of that. Appreciated your information about blocking senders. It also explained why blocking didn’t work. I was pretty sure it was because the names/addressed were spoofed but appreciated the confirmation. At least not doing that will save hours of my time!

Currently Windows is our email supplier (Windows Live Mail) and I can’t really see them doing much.

Question: You said “I’d empty the blocked senders list as you may prevent legitimate mail”.

Do you mean go into that list and clear it all out? I know it must be HUGE given how many years I’ve been adding to it!

Linda

P.S. Don’t know how this will format: I clicked quote mark icon to insert your words in a quote, but it seems to function differently here than in the old Lounge and I couldn’t get rid of the little “P” at the bottom of the message to delete block quote!

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IreneLinda wrote:

Do you mean go into that list and clear it all out?

Yep. If your huge list contains legitimate senders you will never know you have missed their email.
If it drops into your spam folder you can check regularly to see if there is anything you actually want.

My spam folder automatically deletes email over 1 week old. I assume you can set your’s to auto-delete so set it to the maximum time you are likely to be on holiday, plus a few days.

cheers, Paul

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What cured my spam problems years ago—and keeps it cured to this day—is using Gmail and Outlook.com for all/most email. They seem to have the problem solved.

I don’t know if this will work, not something I’ve needed to try:
Create matching accounts at Gmail and/or Outlook.com;
Setup your existing accounts to forward all email to the new accounts;
Only bring email into your desktop email program from the new accounts.

Lugh.
~
Alienware Aurora R6; Win10 Home x64 1803; Office 365 x32
i7-7700; GeForce GTX 1060; 16GB DDR4 2400; 1TB SSD, 256GB SSD, 4TB HD

1 user thanked author for this post.

stanhutchings

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Your domain hosting provider may have tools to block spam. For example, my domain hosting provider offers MagicSpam and SpamAssassin.

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Lugh wrote:

What cured my spam problems years ago—and keeps it cured to this day—is using Gmail and Outlook.com for all/most email. They seem to have the problem solved.

“Solved” might be too strong a word, but I think that I do believe the statement that Google stops as much as 95% of the spam directed towards their account holders.  So, there must be one or two false positives within that number.  My own experience is that I do lose a few Gmail messages from time to time.

Dell E5570 Latitude, Intel Core i5 6440@2.60 GHz, 8.00 GB - Win 10 Pro

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Thanks to each of you for all these ideas! Apologies for not replying sooner: had counted on the notification email, which didn’t come (and which I know I shouldn’t count on but keep forgetting).

Paul: appreciate your answer. I’ll see if I can empty my blocked senders list and see if it has some way to automatically delete items after X period of time.

GoneToPlaid: good idea. I’ll check with our host and see if they have a similar program.

As for Gmail, maybe it’s past time for me to give in and use it. I do have an account there (Google makes it rather difficult NOT to have one), but I’ve resisted using it because, well, because it’s Google and I fear they are after world domination (in partnership with Amazon)!

Anyway, I now have several things to do and to try. Will post back with results once I get them all tried.

Many thanks for all your advice … and for your time in posting it.

Linda

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Do you know about MailWasher?  It will show you whatever emails are waiting on your ISP’s mail servers, and will  delete any you don’t like before downloading to your PC.  You can set up filters to automatically delete known offenders, so you don’t even see them.  It’s good at detecting spam before you download, and has a “learning” feature. Anything deleted goes into a “recycle bin” for x days, so can be recovered if you make a mistake.  It’s said to work with any email program, including Windows Live Mail.  Not free, but in my opinion it’s worth the small cost – have a look.

Windows 10 Pro 64 bit 20H2

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My filter is  too thorough.   It blocks the woody’s newsletters.  I’m training it to let them go through.

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I use Gmail only. I forward email from other accounts (Comcast, etc. that give me an account). I see very little spam, and very seldom do I have to label an email as spam. Apparently Gmail has a strong spam filter. I check it monthly or so. If I find a mislabeled email, I add the sender to my Contacts, or just say Not Spam. There were 11 spam emails when I checked, 2 were probably not spam.

My biggest complaint about Gmail is occasional difficulty formatting. Sometimes I have to copy/paste a draft into Google Docs to fix problems or format the way I want.

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I use Mailwasher Free and Windows Live Mail 2009 with no problems.

I did a complete backup with Macrium Reflect before importing all outlook Express email. That way if a problem occurred I could reload a clean copy of windows 10 and start over.

I have used Mailwasher Free for over 15 yrs. It will read the headers off the ISP but not down load any email so you can choose to accept or delete at the ISP level any email you do not want.

It will let you create “My Friends List” and “My Blacklist”.  With the blacklist an individual sender or an entire web address can be blocked and delete them from the ISP based on your settings. DO NOT use the “Bounce” function because it just lets the sender know they have a valid email address in their database.

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