Spam - VM's filter is useless!

[timbo42]

I'm so sick & tired of VM's utterly useless Spam filter! VM is happy to allow any messages about Viagra, Bitcoin scams, phishing attacks through, but blocks many real e-mails! I've had 20 scam e-mails in the last 3 days trying to get me to renew Norton anti-virus (which I don't have). I mark them as Spam each time, but the system never learns!

As I said the system also blocks proper e-mails sometimes - e-mails from a Dutch company I deal with are always blocked, no matter how many times I mark them as not Spam. I even had an individual e-mail from a UK company acknowledging an order classed as spam.

Its useless, and its always been useless, and it never gets better! I wouldn't mind if the system ever learnt - isn't that what modern sophisticated systems are supposed to do???

[PBrace]

Agree with all the comments. Both my wife and I have Virgin email addresses and we are both being bombarded with spam emails re Bitcoin, Norton renewal and McAfee renewals.VMs spam filter is useless and no matter what we do we cannot get it to recognise these as spam. It is all very well for their agents to get uppity, but this could cause older less alert people to lose money and suffer identity fraud. We both have gmail accounts and get none of these emails on those so this is definitely a Virgin issue. Maybe they had a breach and some fraudsters have a list of Virgin email addresses to attack.

Maybe the time has come to report them to the regulator.

Paul

[boothy99]

Have you tried setting up the filter I posted in message 32, PBrace? It should only take about 5 minutes to set up. You should be pretty much spam-free after that.

[sdu60]

I now have noticed that virgin is diverting some of my mail into a folder called "trash"  This folder is in addition to the spam one. Can't find any rule as to why an email is treated as trash rather than spam. (the spam items now go to my inbox but have a spam tag attached)

Does anyone in virgin read these emails? It seems not as there has been no explanation or clarification.

[timbo42]

No, haven't seen any in Trash, but I think mine's set to empty the trash folder when exiting anyway! I wonder if I missed anything....

Remarkable event today - VM actually detected a Spam e-mail and put in the Spam folder! New sort of Spam as well - a fake Paypal message scam.

[PBrace]

Hi boothy99. No I had not seen your post. I will give it a try - many thanks.

Paul

[the_eyleys]

Echo all the comments above, have even set up pages of rules in the "E-mail filter rules" section of webmail to reject messages with keywords in the subject; Virus/MCafee/Norton/Bitcoin being a few of them.  That simple rule does not work and spam keeps arriving unabated.

And to add insult to injury, if you take a spam mail you've already received and try to resend it to yourself you will probably get the following message...

From: System Administrator
Sent: Tuesday, 5 January 2021 14:08
To: (my spammed account)
Subject: Undeliverable: you're out of protection

Your message did not reach some or all of the intended recipients.

Subject: FW: you're out of protection
Sent: 05/01/2021 14:08

The following recipient(s) cannot be reached:

'***.***@ntlworld.com' on 05/01/2021 14:08
552 5.7.0 SPAM Content Found (VM603) wn03kmV4lsDNpwn05kD0wI

...so VM clearly have the tools to identify something as spam, they just need to apply it to incoming mail rather than just outgoing, you know, look after its own customers maybe!?

[timbo42]

The flood of spam seems to have suddenly ceased! But how long for???

[big_phill]

Still LOADS coming through for me, and also my girlfriend.  Strangely enough another account I use is only getting 3 or 4 a week.  This is an account I generally only use to sign up to mailing lists and websites I just need to enter an email address for.  So if one was going to get spammed, that would be the expected one.

I don't know how many different filters I've got setup.  My personal one within Outlook is catching about 99% of them, but I'm still having to go onto Webmail to mark them as spam and also check for legit emails marked as spam.

[PBrace]

Not for me :-(. I have set up the Regex filter but nothing getting caught as every message is from a different email domain. Another 5 today!

Paul

[boothy99]

PBrace, have you edited the spam filter list by adding the "constant" parts of the spam email addresses to it?