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???

[ALF28]

I agree, virgin do not appear to be able to stop the spam or even identify most of the spam.

I have tried since October 2019 to rectify the spam problem, even tried to have my primary email changed.

I now use other email companies as well and my virgin secondary emails get virtually no spam.

It is probably a third party email outfit, the email server is ziggo based in the netherlands, also owned by liberty global who own virgin.

I use the booth99 filter myself- a good and just added the new boothy99 subject filter, just updated that, and have my own filters also and manage to block nearly all spam totally just using filters but I have 20 dedicated filters to trap the spam, and get zero spam to my inbox now.

Thanks to boothy99, I learned how to use rejex filtering, a good method and filters are the only answer I have found to date without buying spam blocking software which is costly. Virgin need to review their spam filter with some urgency.

My own filters are far superior to the virgin spam filters and it means only known contacts land in my inbox.

One tactic of the spammers/hackers is to bombard a person with spam email to distract them from any fraudulent activity by putting so many emails the actual fraud is missed, drowned in a sea of spam, so the spam can also be hacking/fraud attempts or to get your bank details.

Virgin should have a method of changing the primary address and ditching a compromised primary email address but they "refuse  to do this", have tried before many times. It puts the customer at great risk, especially vulnerable people. Yet secondary email can be deleted out, although one of mine deleted out a year back still exists, so virgin do not even remove properly deleted emails.

alf28

[nlav]

Like many others in this thread I have recently started receiving spam/scam emails (I just fast forwarded to this page as most posters seem to be singing the same song).

The VM Help says to forward to phishing@virginmedia.com but I am by no means sure this does any good, particularly now when they are no doubt under pressure.

I tried setting a filter rule to catch all incoming emails with a particular product name in the body but this seems to be ineffective; I couldn't see any detailed help for setting these rules and may, of course, have done it wrong.

I suppose that I could consider moving to another ISP but would it be any better?  The situation certainly makes VM's price rises harder to take.

Can anyone point to an authoritative discussion of this problem with constructive suggestions for self-help? I will try to follow up Alf28's pointers.

[ALF28]

The phishing reporting to virgin media is mainly for fake virgin emails, also there is net reporting online form.

For general spam emails best to send to report@phishing.gov.uk

see    Re: Daily Spam re Norton/Mcafee - Page 10 - Virgin Media Community - 4501578

There is no easy solution to blocking spam.

The Virgin spam filter only stops spam it recognises, but many still get through.

Other that buying and using spam software, the only other solution is filtering, many posts on the subject by me and others.

Other than changing email, or buying software, training filters to recognise the spam email content is one solution.

Filtering condition body will not catch much because many emails have no content, also  filter condition "subject" and "from" using keywords and part of the email address that remains fixed.

The other option is just to delete the spam emails.

I have stuck with virgin  because it is  fibre, the alternative is a telephone line broadband ADLS , mine is expensive but the package includes tv and landline.

I have had spam since 2016, but recently many more virgin  emails getting spam on the community posts, must be a data breach of email addresses??

alf28

[timbo42]

 I was told by a VM representative a couple of years ago when I first complained about VM's spam filter that if you put e-mails in your Spam folder, the system would analyse all those classed as Spam and, in theory, learn what was spam and what was not. Thus, if this wasn't a total lie, then I'm not sure why we would need to forward them to phishing@virginmedia.com which would apparently do the same job. Strikes me that if forwarding them to the phishing email is the way to go, putting them in the Spam filter as opposed to just deleting them is a waste of time....or is it the other way round???

[ALF28]

spam emails delete after 30 days and links in email are disabled making the email safe. (they can be recovered by marking not spam)

trash emails delete after 7 days, unless you empty the trash folder.

If deletion is required-

Either way they delete out with a short time period, in case one need recovering, so I would choose the 30 days spam folder

Not sure if virgin look at the spam or analyse it.

For security reason most  ISP'S STORE  "all emails" for a long time even the deleted ones.

ISP's have access to all emails so they can monitor them if required or by authorities, so some emails use encryption for privacy.

Most ISP'S do not discuss their security, it is confidential.

I do mark emails spam and put into the spam folder but do not know if they are analysed as they are deleted out after 30 days anyway.

Having tried reporting phishing to virgin , they are only concerned with virgin related phishing, so reporting to action fraud is also beneficial for non virgin general spam such as bitcoin, antivirus etc,

alf28

[Baz8755]

Me too!

I have all my Virgin media accounts forward emails onto my Gmail account so that I can get them on my phone, my computer however picks up the virgin accounts directly.

Gmail manages to block almost all the spam including any items that virgin has forwarded, the virgin email accounts however do not block anywhere near as much and for some reason over the past few days the volume of spam has spiraled on these accounts.

However the Virgin spam filter blocks email from my wifes Virgin email account to me and no matter how many times I mark as not spam it will not stop blocking (her email address is in my contact list), strangely when i sent an email from my Virgin account to hers it is never blocked.

[kats56]

I have never had a problem with my e-mail account until Friday, suddenly I am being flooded with thousands of spam e-mails, I only use my virgin e-mail for certain things and I've never had spam in there before, only getting a few legit e-mails a day. I don't know how to resolve this as its taking ages to go through them in case there are any legit e-mails that I want to keep. I've ran a malware can and changed my password but they still keep coming. Last count there was 2032 e-mails and every time I look there are more. I started blacklisting them but just couldn't keep up. 

[timbo42]

That's terrible! I had dozens a day, but never 1000s!

I now seem to be having a run of BItcoin related scams - claiming to tell me the 'secret' of the wealth of various celebrities. Nonsense of course and very unconvincing.

[hammic]

Somebody I know had a torrent of spam to their @virginmedia.com address, while my @ntlworld.com address seemed to escape the spam.

Several weeks later, the VM account seems to only receive a few spam emails a week now, while my own @ntlworld.com email address has received about 4 spam emails today - I suspect the amount will increase for a few weeks, before easing back off.

In the meantime, it will be a good test for MailWasher Pro which I use to notify me of any emails. I mark any spam that is yet flagged as spam and that's it for me. I believe MailWasher Pro bounces the emails as well as deleting the emails from the email server - so it'll be interesting to see how well and quickly this tactic works.

[kats56]

I've got french, German, Chinese and arabic e-mails. Loads of different ones 😤