Spam emails

[Jeanettej]

Am getting an increasing number of spam emails despite setting up filter rules and blocking the sender.  Am worried that I might need to shut down my email account.  Does anyone know how to combat this?

[coenoby · Accepted solution]

---

@Jeanettej wrote:

Am getting an increasing number of spam emails despite setting up filter rules and blocking the sender. 

---

So are those spam emails appearing in your Inbox or are they appearing in your Spam folder?

If they are appearing in your Spam folder that means VM's spam filtering is doing its job. VM's webmail system does have an option to "Reject all spam emails" which would mean that any emails VM identify as spam never appear in your mailbox. However, I would strongly recommend NOT to use that option. All spam filters occasionally flag genuine emails as spam and so by rejecting all "spam" you will inevitably miss a number of genuine emails.

If these spam emails are appearing in your Inbox it is a waste of time adding the sender to the blocklist (formerly known as Blacklist).;

1. Spammers change the sending email address with each wave of spam they send out specifically to evade blocklists.
2. Adding an address to VM's blocklist does not stop emails being received from that address, it sends them to the spam folder.

Also, using filter rules is not always a solution. Spammers work hard to design their emails so that they are difficult to filter out. You can also easily find that your filter rules have unexpected consequences and filter out some genuine emails that you want to receive,

You can close the email account down if you wish but you certainly don't need to. In my experience spam seems to come in waves. At the moment you are obviously getting a lot but provided you don't respond to those emails in any way spammers tend to move on to another set of email addresses after a while.. So in a couple of weeks you will almost certainly find the volume of spam you are getting will drop away again,

If you do decide to close your VM email account  you need to be aware that VM no longer allow you to create new VM email accounts. However, even if VM still allowed you to create new email accounts you would be better off opening a new email account with a dedicated email service such as Gmail, Outlook.com or one of the many others.

Always remember though that it is reckoned that around 85% of all emails sent are spam emails so your new email account is not going to be immune from them either.

Hope that helps.

Coenoby

[Ashleigh_C]

Hi there @Jeanettej

Thank you so much for your first post to our community forums and welcome to team, it's great to have you on board. 

I'm so sorry to hear that you are facing this issue with your emails! 

A big thank you to @coenoby for their help and guidance on this so far, have you been able to follow the steps and guidance given? 

How are things looking now? 

[ALF28]

Spam-a nuisance

I also was getting regular spam emails which are a nuisance and potentially phishing emails or with links or attachments which are dangerous.

Mostly these were tagged as spam but some do get through.

I no longer use the virgin email  (ntlworld.com) and have transferred to free outlook.com and gmail.com and yahoo.com

If you get repeating spam email they can be filtered using the conditions-

FROM

SUBJECT

BODY

The filter element  needs to be specific, such as the "full" email address, "full" company name, "full" product description etc. or even using the from domain as a filter such as @xxx.com which is very effective. (care is needed or mishaps can occur with unexpected results))

These spam emails can be filtered to spam, in my case as the email is no longer used, I filter regular spam senders to discard and this blocks a lot of the spam, so I do not even see it as I was getting so many recently up to 7 a day sometimes and just clicking on these spam emails can be dangerous.

The VM primary email can not be removed from the VM account  unfortunately, so if heavily spammed one option is to reduce using the VM email and use a free email service such as outlook.com or gmail.com or yahoo.com which I have done and I get few spams.

I also set up filters and folders for the few genuine email sender addresses, so that so that they filter to specific folders and these are sequenced first prior to other filters.

alf28