Daily Spam re Norton/Mcafee

[andypat]

So much spam getting through at mo , both my wife and I getting same spam, separate email addresses also  my mother is getting the same too.

Been going on a while now - anyone else getting them?

[ALF28]

My spam folder was last emptied on 15/01/2021 approx 1 month ago, leaving a month of emails still present.

Wise to be aware that the spam folder deletes emails so then lost, may be 30 days or longer but effectively they are marked for future deletion ,if a genuine email slips through wrongly tagged then that could be a problem.

One good thing is that links are disabled in the spam folder.

A wrongly tagged spam email can be marked as not spam and returned to the inbox, but wise to check all spam emails witin the 30 day limit , say check daily or weekly but no longer than 30 days or one could loose emails or just not be aware they have been deleted.

I do agree the spam deletion can be longer than 30 days but some pople may not be aware it is a temporary folder and they will be deleted at some time.

If  required spam can still be left tagged and go to the inbox in settings, some members do this to avoid wrongly tagged genuine emails going to the spam folder and set for deletion after a time period.

As spam filtering can give false positives on genuine emails, this needs to be considered, usually this can happen with non UK emails or where the email headers have changed recently from a regular newsletter etc- just happened to me a regular newsletter switched to an amazon server and was marked spam.

alf28

[BeestonBoy71]

Thanks boothy99,

I have set up the two filters as you've suggested and will add to them as new ones come in. See how it goes.

Just signed up to SpamCop.net as well and I'll forward anything getting through.

I'll check spam and see if any legit one come through as well.

Much appreciated.

[ALF28]

SPAM SOFTWARE

Have tried the free Spamfighter, supposed to partner with microsoft. (two attempts now)

Installed  this with thunderbird, but would not work needed a licence number to activate so is not free as indicated??

Some issues may be caused by using imap rather than pop mail, as in the case of mailwasher which failed for me to work.

Anyone using the free Spamfighter with virgin mail?

I have tried windows 10 mail recently as an email client to read virgin emails, works but some of own folders did not work, empty or just one email showing.

Virgin email can not be fetched to work with gmail, I have done this with one email not virgin.

Looking at the free Spamfighter I saw the last update was 2017 and it only works with Microsoft mail  on 32 bit not 64 bit.

Unless you pay for paid spam blocking software, a free option is hard to find or impossible?

Spam software is perhaps 50-100% depending which one is used, so I rely on virgin tagging spam and pick out the untagged spam via settings -filters myself.

alf28

[boothy99]

Good to hear you've joined SpamCop, BeestonBoy71

Once you've confirmed your own valid email address(es) / domains, I (eventually) found the quickest way to send reports is to save a batch of scum-spam (individually saved as .eml files) in a folder on your device / PC ...

Head over to the folder / highlight them all (I forget the maximum in one go) / email them off to your personal SpamCop email address they gave you / wait a few minutes for their processing / then when they send their email back - click on the first link and click the send button to confirm on the opened webpage. The "Report Spam" for any others you sent will appear on the same page, saving you going back to the email. 

You might have got all that anyway .... but took me a while to figure out why the sent emails were getting blocked by Virgin as spam 🤨 I initially copy/pasted full headers into an email. Mistake !! 

The .eml as attachments method works perfectly, bypassing any Virgin blocks 👍

Happy scum-spam-squishing !!!

[Humblestrummer]

Afternoon all

Astonishing that nobody from Virgin has had the courtesy to offer advice on how to set their filter conditions. Or better still,  do what we pay them to do.

I see that my list of offending domains is almost identical to BeestonBoy71 (message 154). I have 4 ntlworld email addresses, 3 of which are getting the spam.  My filter settings seem to be working 80% of the time , and I am putting the inconsistency down to my experimenting with 'Contains', 'Domains', and 'All'. I am finding that excluding the prefix and suffix from the domain, eg  (em.)biglots(.com) or (mail.)justfab(.co.uk) removes more variables which tend to change with each message. Here is my latest list. Note that they have started using 'support@uk.norton' to trap the unwary:

lpandl|mail.justfab|justfab|em.biglots|biglots|yfkginous|time.yfkginous|on.thesecurise|thesecurise|nam.pb-dynmktg||pb-dynmktg|dynmktg|ldyfearful|nytimes|yourhealthcareprovider|mx1.succ6.nl|mx1|succ6|osuginous|atlanticrecords|warnerrecords|tenderapp|dpxgainful|goodtastestories|uknorton|qbpsublet|nemona.ilsg|nemona|ilsg|xxwbuiseness|pzpsport|dietchef|korisnaknjiga|em.biglots|biglots|roundhouse|ichbuiseness|mediapro|hjem-is.dk|petsathome|ewboutside|cmu.edu|nnzfitness|zoosk|whoopee|iam|ibm|cmu|edu|bloglovin|independent|npc|se|berlinskemedia|iam.ibm|zdcfootball|cmu.edu|giveaway

I've taken up boothy99's suggestion of saving the spam as eml attachments and will join Spamcop.  We'll see.

[boothy99]

@ Humblestrummer (".... will join Spamcop") ...

Great 😁 The more, the merrier 👍👌

[VIPerson]

I take back the statement I posted earlier in this thread that the spammers only seemed to work Mon to Fri.

I have had a flood of their emails this weekend all from different email domains so the filtering would be a waste of time for me.

When is VM going to do something? Also why have no forum team members jumped in on this thread? It would be nice if VM were to acknowledge there is a problem at the moment lets face it we pay enough for this so called service (prices go up in April!)

[ALF28]

Virgin keep putting up the price and it is getting high, mine will be close  to £1k per year, so agree the service could be better.

The email settings are not well illustrated in the virgin help pages, it took me a long time to understand the filters.

The virgin forum team  generally to not get involved with advice on email filtering, so customers try to help each other.

My spam is generally mon-friday, the spammers often take a break at weekends, but not always the case, my spam has reduced of late.

Simply deleting  spam or marking emails spam puts them in the spam folder works well but requires some effort to sort them.

The spammers constantly change domains to get round filtering, so whitelisting can help (of known genuine contacts) using spam software or setting up one filter  can this, if you see my earlier post message 157.

alf28

[technut]

Getting absolutely bucket loads worse its ever been all the filters I have set up and additional efforts have become redundant a lot of these spam emails are very basic and repetitive and should have been been blocked by virgin its gone past a joke. I have had to spend a lot of time preparing to change to a new email as it's obvious whoever is in charge of virgin mail are totaly useless

[ALF28]

USE ALTERNATIVE EMAILS- a good solution if spam problems are targeting  your email address.

I use several different emails myself so in the event of one being spammed  or I hacked can change emails if needed to another secure and private email.

Most emails require activity- log in or they close in 90 days, including the paid for  virgin email service!

Gmail.com and Microsoft Outlook.com  (both can be web mail or via apps/email client) are reliable and with 2 step authentication is very secure with web  mail and you can have more than one account with them for free.

The gmail spam filtering is good.

I use throw away emails sometimes and also have aliases on some emails which have the facility in outlook to switch off log in so the alias is secure.

Virgin email is not the best, and there is no way to remove or change a spammed/hacked  virgin primary email address, only secondary virgin emails can be removed, in outlook.com email  the default primary email address can be switched at any time to any alias you want.

alf28