I got an email from a company from the distance past which may be fake

I have now started to use  filters in  settings to action -discard specific spam emails and pick out a word in the subject as the condition or from a particular domain, but also filtering emails that I do want to the inbox to avoid discard if needed.

The option to discard means repeat spam emails will not appear in the inbox.

Many of my email will repeat over and over again such as subjects, spins, coffee, solar and many are via gmail.com so I now target them to discard.

I have used the words coffee, solar and domain gmail.com.

I use other free emails  and to log in, now so just try to keep my old ntlworld.com primary email clean and avoid the spam, emails. These are usually phishing emails after bank details  or passwords or can  download malicious software if you click on links.

Discard will delete the email and a powerful way to eliminate spam emails but needs careful setting up of filters to avoid mistakes, so the sequence of the filters has to be in order to have correct operation

It’s always best to check the mail headers they can often identify spam. I use Apple Mail for reading my email and only get about 1 spam message a month and never see any spam in my inbox. Apple is very good at getting rid of real spam messages before you even see them. I have an email provider that lets you have unlimited mail boxes, so I use a system like ‘bank@myurl’, ‘gas@myurl’ and ‘vmc@myurl’. This readily identifies any companies that have ‘sold’ my email address.

In some cases hackers can use your email address and this can be for "illegal activity"  such as imperonation, identity teft, fraud, unauthorised access, data protection breach.

Hackers/spammers can also set up new email addresses in your own name and send spam to you or use this for other purposes, the object being to get your attention or may be impersonation.

In some cases hackers will take over an email address which is more serious and difficult to recover, so tight security is needed.

I have had that happen a few times, and often find someone has used my email for things such as purchases, dating websites etc, it can happen to any email. In some cases it may be a mistake of typing but always check out anything unusual.

Sometimes your email adess can be used by hackers  to register your account with a company to sign up for things by hackers, so you get an email which will ask for your details (phishing) and may be linked to fake websites

If that occurs change paswords and check email account security and check out any strange events but avoid clinking links in the email.